Artist Statement
This body of work develops an evolving thesis of Canadian Gothic through the landscape of Smiths Falls, Ontario, where decay is not a force of overt collapse but the quiet result of absence. It does not announce itself; it settles in, accumulates, and lingers across buildings and spaces that feel suspended between use and abandonment. Within this condition, beauty persists in a diminished, unresolved form—something akin to love as it endures past its moment of vitality: present, but altered; felt, but no longer whole. The work locates a particular kind of Gothic sensibility in this tension, where traces of youth, care, and intention remain visible yet cannot be restored.
In contrast to the mythologized certainty of American Gothic, which fixed beauty within a narrative of emergence and identity, this project proposes a more diffuse and uncertain condition. Canadian Gothic is not declared but sensed, existing without clear boundary or definition, embedded in places that resist resolution. Smiths Falls becomes emblematic of this state: shaped by decay yet inseparable from it, sustained by the very erosion that constrains it. What remains is a landscape marked by quiet contradiction, where absence produces form, and where beauty endures not despite decline, but because of it.