Twenty-three Kilometres is a three volume set of artist books documenting every instance of the Dundas name encountered along three walks of Toronto’s Dundas Street in the summer of 2020. Conceived as a way to demonstrate the road’s monumental qualities, and advocate for changing the name of the street. The work pays homage to conceptual artists such as Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari.
In 2020 at the height of the COVI-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter uprising, and ongoing public debates around racist and colonial monuments around the world, my wife Ellie and I set out to walk the entirety of Dundas Street in Toronto. Earlier that year in solidarity with long-standing calls from BIPOC and other marginalised communities and their allies for governments and institutions to address racist, and colonial toponyms and monuments, I launched an online petition calling on the city of Toronto to rename Dundas Street. The petition was inspired by the work of the late Sir Geoff Palmer and Adam Ramsay in Edinburgh to add a plaque to the Scottish capital’s Melville Monument detailing the awful human consequences of Lord Melville, aka Henry Dundas’, role in obstructing and delaying the end of the transatlantic slave trade.
By walking Dundas Street and documenting every instance of the Dundas name, we endeavoured to highlight the various ways that imperial and colonial violence and power, represented by this name and others hid in plain sight. and how this power was replicated through official infrastructure, such as street signs and house numbers, but also the ways in which it was reproduced in the seemingly benign vernacular of businesses names, wheelie bin labels, address plates, community murals, lost pet signs, and similar forms of public expression.
We would take three walks to complete our tour of Dundas Street. Our first walk covered the distance between the street’s eastern terminus at Kingston Road and the westernmost reaches of Trinity Bellwoods Park in Toronto’s west side. Our second walk began a week later at Etobicoke Creek, which forms the city’s occidental boundary, and moved east. Our third covered the remaining section between Shaw Street and Roncesvalles Avenue. Along these walks we would photograph over one thousand instances of the Dundas name and chronicle the changing character of the street at a pivotal juncture in its history.
These walks would form the basis of my doctoral dissertation and are currently being developed into a stand alone boxed set of artist books with an accompanying essay.
You can view printers proofs of each walk here: WALK ONE, WALK TWO, WALK THREE
Sample pages from WALK ONE are below.
