Of Rust and Rays
Of Rust and Rays
(Slater Steel)
2024
Archival pigment prints on transparent film, hand shaped birch, hand cast and tinted resin, colour reflective film, magnets, UV varnish, light.
Wall installation (studio view), dimensions variable. Five sculptures: 8" x 15" x 1" each. Twelve photographs: 12" x 16" each.
The de-industrialization process has been happening across Canada slowly over time for the past couple of decades. In 2019, Slater Steel, a company operated in Hamilton, Ontario’s North End since 1906 was partially demolished. The impact of this demolition created some environmental problems and affected the residential community surrounding this site by covering houses, cars, and neighbourhoods in decades of built up dust and debris. Since this demolition the steel corrugated shell of the building has remained; slowly being taken down piece by piece.
My uncle worked for Slater Steel between the 1970’s and its eventual closure. As a daughter of a steel worker I have witnessed the cultural and economic shift in Hamilton’s North End from working class trades jobs to creative industries and gentrification. Hamilton’s industrial buildings are slowly being sold off and repurposed for film sets and prop houses, new condo buildings and development opportunities; invigorating this community with new energy and growth but significantly shifting this industrial landscape and the neighbourhoods that inhabit it. All while a smaller yet core group of steel workers continue to manufacture steel on a national and international scale in some of Canada’s most well known steel manufacturing companies.
Of Rust and Rays combines photographs on transparent film of Slater Steel’s remaining fractured architecture with hand formed corrugated resin sculptures that bisect each image. The corrugated resin sculptures are cast from a discarded found mould that mimics the texture of the steel corrugated metal walls that remain as Slater Steel’s shell. They feel like floating windows, or doors, domestic venetian blinds, or segments of the steel corrugated building plucked from the site. The juxtaposition of colour, material, light, and architectural subject matter references how industrial and domestic spaces collide in this working class neighbourhood, and reflects upon the fluctuating and tumultuous state of this industrial heritage in Hamilton’s changing North End.
Driving along Burlington St. And Nikola Tesla Boulevard I often witness the touch of light glinting off of Hamilton’s corrugated metal industrial buildings that make up much of the North End’s architecture. As an installation, Of Rust and Rays attempts to capture this phenomenon in the fluctuating precarious state of this landscape. Acidic greens and saturated blues mix with safety yellow and rusty orange. Sunlight bleaches and weathers long standing metal buildings while impacting the subtleties of colour and light that illuminate these buildings during a standard twelve hour shift. Latent images trace the architecture, processes and people that worked in these buildings, and the residue left behind when these sites cease to operate. Layered, ethereal, and transient the resultant photo-based sculptures in Of Rust and Rays are visually unstable, constantly changing according to a viewer’s movement and lighting conditions, fractured, and fragile; just like the state of Hamilton’s industrial landscape today.
Research and References
Slater Steels Incorporated. Industrial Hamilton: A Trail to the Future.