Kathleen Hearn
43.62783, -79.42013 (West Island Landscape)
May 23 – June 1, 2025
43.62783, -79.42013 (West Island Landscape) is a short film featuring seven trees that once stood on the West Island of Ontario Place. The work is a portrait of place; it is also about memory, trees, the use and development of land, the environment, and our relationship to the natural world.
As a child of the 1970s, you could say I grew up with Ontario Place. I have early memories of bumper boats and super slides. As an adult, I remember trees, bike rides, walks, sunsets, and swims at the beach. Once billed as a “Once in a lifetime, never-before place,”1 this one-time urban forest is now gone—a non-place.
The video was filmed at night over several weeks in late October 2023. A few months later, the final gates were locked, and by early October 2024, all 850 trees had been destroyed.
Trees are time made manifest. Citing the last lines from Ian Hamilton Finlay’s 1979 poem Arbre (Tree) trees are:
Roots
Years
Songs
Rings
In the video, the trees stand as sentinels between land and sky. As they are no longer there, the recording bears witness to their loss. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes asserts that the image is what “has been,” as it captures a fleeting moment that can never be recaptured—each viewing allows us to mourn as we confront the dead once again.
- Lyric from: Theme from Ontario Place by D Claman · 1971 — Date 1971. Authors Claman, Dolores [composer] Morris, Richard [lyricist]. Publisher Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Thompson Publishing, 1971.
Kathleen Hearn is a Toronto-based visual artist and educator. Her practice often involves long-term negotiations, collaborations and co-operations exploring connections between portrait and landscape, documentary and fiction. Hearn’s work has been exhibited across Canada, and at international venues in countries including: China, Mexico, Columbia, Argentina, Iceland, Senegal, Benin, Nigeria, Paraguay and Cuba. Hearn earned a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University and Bachelor of Arts from University of Guelph. She is currently a Professor of Photography in the joint Art and Art History program between Sheridan College and the University of Toronto Mississauga.
Special thanks to Mehrnaz Rohbakhsh, Lois Andison, Rebecca Diederichs, John McCartney, Lisa Neighbour, and Carlo Cesta.
