Project description: Platform

Platform was begun in 2003 and first exhibited in May 2004 as an installation work in the Museum subway station commissioned by Toronto's Contact Festival of Photography. All of the advertisements were removed from the station and the Platform photographs (at a scale of 4 x 6 feet) were substituted ("station domination" in marketing-speak).

The photographs are of deer-hunting platforms - also known as tree stands - found in the Central Ontario countryside in Canada. These are a form of vernacular architecture, a "built form", that is constructed by hunters out of a variety of found materials usually in a wooded area by the side of a field. The deer-hunting platforms are, of course, not marked on any maps and had to be located by chance and by word of mouth. They resemble children's tree-houses and that is what they were thought to be by many urbanites first viewing them in the subway station.

 

 

The installation at the Museum subway station was conceptually appropriate for reasons other than the obvious play on the idea of a "platform" - for subway riders usually a site of boredom and waiting as it is perhaps for hunters, too, much of the time. Directly above the Museum station is the Royal Ontario Museum that features many dioramas and exhibits reflecting the natural world. What is not highlighted in the museum and overlooked by visitors is that many specimens on display were, in fact, hunted both through museum expeditions and donations by hunters. The history of Natural History can also be said to be a history of hunting.