Isaac Applebaum

Isaac Applebaum extends the concept, both figuratively and literally, as he considers his relationship to the Jewish community centre. However, it is not the BJCC that appears in his installation but one in Winnipeg that he often visited as he grew up there. In this sense, Applebaum focuses on the idea of a community centre. As a result of his background, he approaches it as a kind of "centre" of gravity for an emigré community. Applebaum assembles in installation form a set of poignant artifacts - his father's suitcase, film footage from the 1950s, photographs and an audio recounting family members' survivors' stories. These threads are woven together to trace the path of Jews who fled war-torn Europe to establish themselves in postwar western Canada. At the same time, Applebaum's installation confirms the continuing psychic power of a journey that, in his words, encompasses "war, destruction and renewal."

Katherine Knight

Katherine Knight also considers the resonance of the community centre as a concept, identifying a particular aspect - the swimming pool - as a kind of universal signifier of the pleasures that sites like this can offer. Inspired by her memories of other community centres that were formative in her own childhood, Knight creates a productive tension between the fountain-like images of the yearly ritual of the filling of the BJCC pool, a place of collective experience with its own documented history of programmes and activities, and the curiously iconic image of a young girl simply enjoying a drink of water. In her poetic way, Knight subtly allows us to consider a primary distinction between sites that accumulate a history through documentation and those in which memory resides. Although the distinctions may overlap it has been pointed out that memory tends to reside in the body while history attaches itself to place.

Adrian Fish

The idea of the community centre as a place that is a function of social needs in perpetual flux is implied by Adrian Fish's deadpan pairings of black and white images of the BJCC's squash courts. The photographs, paired to show the opposing halves of one current and three former courts, reveal to us a shift in communal priorities, spurred perhaps by demographics, that have necessitated a reclaiming of the courts for new purposes. Even as the courts now function to house more recently-popular recreational activities (a rock-climbing wall), a children's playroom or equipment storage they continue to bear the graphic markings that identify them as one-time squash courts. The white cube-like rooms become palimpsests as one use overlays another without completely effacing the memory of what came before. Fish has astutely identified the appearance of the historical in the everyday life of the BJCC. Certainties give way to the inevitability of change.

Arthur Renwick

The BJCC is physically not only a set of buildings. Arthur Renwick steps outside to focus his attention on the lands surrounding them. He brings a First Nations perspective to his work as he highlights the traces of beavers who still live in the valley, cutting down trees and building dams on the tributary of the Don River that flows between the parking lots. He uses a vertical form as the ground for his image of the entrance to the beaver's lodge that simultaneously has scroll-like and totemic allusions. In this way, Renwick attempts to address perceived imbalances between our perceptions of the natural and the cultural at this site. He reaffirms the existence of an ongoing natural history of the ravine site while pointing to a cultural history that contains both the relatively recent presence of the Jewish community and a more ancient inhabitation by indigenous peoples. As well, the signs of the beaver remind us of the economies that drove the original settlement of the Toronto area by the first Europeans that resulted in the eventual displacement of the aboriginal people.