Leslie Spit Project

The Leslie Street Spit is an otherworldly place of contradictions. Feral yet tended, landscape and waterscape, it is a renowned conservation area built on demolition waste located at the foot of Leslie Street in Toronto. The Spit generates a lot of art-making, in evidence on its rubble beaches and in the myriad responses one finds in galleries and books.

The selected photographs in this series come from my own Leslie Spit Project. They were shot from dusk on, well into the night under the full moon. The resulting images are evocative, strange, almost romantic. The long exposures capture things we don’t see when we’re there: colour at night, stark reaching shadows, smeared trails of branches and flowers as they whip back and forth in the wind. You can almost hear the coyotes howl and the insects buzz all around you.