Sara Graham: The London Series

Toronto-based Sara Graham has been primarily concerned with the issues and ideas of the contemporary city. One of the central engagements in her practice is in the mapping of systems and networks and how their interconnectivity affects everyday lives. She is specifically engaged in a cross-disciplinary approach that incorporates philosophical, cultural, sociological and architectural criticism of the nature and condition of the city and city life.

Mapping has long been a central tenet of Graham’s practice. Over the past several years, she has created a series of diagramatic drawings and sculptural models that describe and represent urban networks, traversing that liminal space between the real and the imagined.

Inspired by research into the physical and psycho geographies of London, Ontario The London Series (2010) examines the notion of disrupted networks. Here, Graham brings together the utopian and the historical in an investigation of the “invisible urban infrastructures” of London, Ontario. The London Series uses cartography as a starting point for the construction of physical prototypes that could be inserted in real places in London to connect the actual and imaginary histories that she maps.

In a suite of digitally rendered drawings silkscreened onto Plexiglas, drawn from a late nineteenth-century fire-insurance map, Graham re-orients and updates London’s historical urban grid into a three-dimensional play of line and shadow. Basic city networks are expanded and abstracted, with overlapping foundations and distorted elevations adding up to a new view of civic cartography.

Sara Graham holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from the University of Guelph. Her works have been exhibited across Canada and have recently been featured in exhibitions at Museum London (London, Ontario), Kenderdine Art Gallery (Saskatoon), Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), Confederation Centre Art Gallery (Charlottetown), Dalhousie Art Gallery (Halifax), The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery (St. John’s), Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (Kitchener), MKG127 (Toronto) and Nuit Blanche (Toronto).

Photos: Toni Hafkenscheid