Archaeology of 26 and 28 Oxford Street
Nuit Blanche,Toronto, 2007

Archaeology is a series of six illuminated photographs displayed in pedestal viewing booths that were strategically placed in front of the residences at 26 and 28 Oxford Street in the fall of 2007. The original photos, taken in September and October of 1998, reveal the massive, rapid destruction of a low rental building, underground squatters’ spaces and a house in the heart of Kensington Market in Toronto.  These structures were demolished in order to make way for a significant gentrification real estate project: the construction of thirteen brand new townhouses.

Over a period of five weeks in the fall of 1998, hundreds of photographs were obsessively taken, witnessing the beginnings of the gentrification and the effect the development had on the people who were associated with the particular geography. 

Archaeology of 26 and 28 Oxford Street is not intended as simply a nostalgic recollection for those persons who knew the old residence at 28 Oxford and the communal space at 26 Oxford, but as a testimony of the on-going machine of urban renewal, of physical transformation of landscape and people.  The viewing pedestals are located where the original photographs were taken and as such, evoke the original photographic point of view.  In this way, the public are able to look at the photographs which emerge from the viewing booth and consider the new structures, the new space and possibly imagine the new histories now being created.

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Arnold Koroshegyi All rights reserved