P02 Contextual Montage

Using the technique of montage, develop three drawings that situate your thesis topic within its relevant contexts, issues, discourses and assumptions.




Destabilising Otherness

The Homely becoming Unhomely; the familiar becoming estranged, abandoned and lifeless. This sensation, felt at the sight of architectural decay and darkness, differs from the awe-striking power of the Sublime. The Uncanny is fearsome in its subtleties, in its ability to emerge from within ourselves; where the sublime is impressed upon us, the Uncanny finds its origins in the shadowy pools of our thoughts - what we thought of as recognizable takes on the eerie precipice of the unknown.

"The house, like man, can become a skeleton. A superstition is enough to kill it. Then it is terrible." Hugo, Les Travailleurs

This montage sought to take an object of familiarity and make it unfamiliar in its decay, representing 'the Other'. The School of Architecture was artificially aged using a collection of photographs taken of the decayed spaces throughout the city of Cambridge - these were then grafted on to the building.



























Liminal Lullaby

The second of the three montages depicted a catalogue of vacant death beds. The aesthetic of the image was deliberately shrouded so as to obscure the image slightly, making it appear separate from the onlooker, as though it is hidden under the surface of water. Various beds are portrayed in which the threshold from this life to the unknown next is traversed; among them, a prison bed, an operating table, a hosptial cot, a lethal injection bed, and the beds at Auschwitz. The beds are empty - the onlooker cannot know what event has taken place, but can only sense the atmosphere of the images, and thus interpret them. This montage strives to take one of the most familiar and 'homely' objects, and transform it into the Uncanny.


The(y) Past in the Current

The last of the montages is a depiction of the Richview Memorial Cemetery, at the intersection of the highways 401, and the 427, in Toronto. It attempts to show the distortion of the senses at this site, and the eeriness of the motion that surrounds the stillness of the cemetery. This montage is a palimpsest. It layers both the lives of those who settled in the original community of Richview (a town long since swallowed by the tides of time), and the lives of those who contributed to the building of the infrastructure that surrounds it. The history of the city is depicted here, superimposed on the current condition of the cemetery, at the centre of one of the busiest intersections of Canada. This cemetery has seen generations come and go, the land change from fields to limbs of steel and concrete - it has stood sentinel, a witness to the passing of time.