"Station to Station"
Our featured art display this summer and fall present the photographs and writings of Anthony Easton and David Preyde.
This "train spotting" exhibit is intriguing in its detailed attention to the aesthetics of the transit stations
in Toronto. Thanks Anthony and David for sharing your reflections with us!
Anthony Easton is a writer, artist and
student, originally from Edmonton and now living in Toronto. His writing has been published in books, magazines, and newspapers.
His photography has been in galleries in New York, Chicago, Toronto, and Edmonton and in the collection of the National Gallery
of Canada. He is enrolled at the University of Toronto as a Master's student in Theological Studies. He is interested in language
and how identity is constructed. Part of this is an emergent understanding of autism as an identity set.
David Preyde was born and raised in Oshawa, Ontario. He has been attending the
University of Toronto since 2006, where he majors in equity studies. He was diagnosed with N.L.D. when he was 12, and with
Asperger's when he was 13. His career goal is to help establish an autistic culture.
Artist Statement:
David and I didn't know each
other when he started writing reviews of all the subway stations, and I started shooting the same. David was more systematic
then I was. But we both had this idea, of documenting transportation. The work then, in the tiny details, in the side long
glances-are obviously about trains and about going from point a to point b.
They
are an attempt to make an aesthetic experience in the quotidian.
But, train-spotting
is an autistic trait. These shots and these words, come together at a singular locus point, though the subject is transit,
the subtext (and there are those who think we are incapable of subtext), becomes our role as taxonomists. In this capacity,
the ranking, and the noting, of information becomes unique to the autistic experience. The process then, becomes as important,
as the work itself.
If process becomes biography, and paratext can lead
into text; the work here in visual and textual meeting, become a narrative not only about the nature of the city we live in,
but the lives that are informed by that city.
