TWENTY SEVEN YEARS LATER

Summer 1992 and I am preparing a travelling exhibition of large paintings entitled “Boreal Blues”, a reflection on the fragile nature of the world’s largest forest that circumscribes the Arctic. Rapidly running out of space in my cramped basement on St- Laurent Boulevard I was searching for a spacious affordable studio to rent. A fellow artist guided me to a massive industrial building on St-Zotique West, (in the Marconi-Alexandra area), recently vacated by a high end commercial printer. With vast undivided open spaces on the second and third floors, industrial cage elevators and three huge indoor loading bays it was perfect. Within a month my chosen twelve hundred square feet on the third floor was taking shape and I moved into what has been an invaluable work/living space for the last twenty-seven years.

The neighbourhood was rough back then, small, run down, car body shops filled the labyrinth of back streets with the smell of toxic paints and resins. Bikers cruised what was obviously THEIR territory, street lights hardly worked and a foul pedestrian tunnel under the abandoned railway tracks challenged the bravest of those who walked the streets at night. Early morning and late afternoons however, the streets thronged with the most diverse and vibrant river of garment workers starting or ending their long hard shifts in the knitting mills and sweat shops still in operation. Soon these were to fall silent as their owners one by one moved their operations to Haiti or China and the streets, silent, awaited the next generation of commercial life to was over the area.

Meanwhile…we, the artists stayed. We created in our studios, fought to resist eviction, built a community and witnessed the creep of gentrification and change.

202 St-Zotique West was somehow a magical building. One just had to wish for something and it appeared. On the ground floor was a gigantic warehouse space called SOS Decor with recycled movie sets and theatre props. On any given day you could walk in to see the latest additions…a twelve foot high slice of watermelon complete with black shiny seeds, an Egyptian sarcophagus, Doric classical Greek columns and endless smart kitchen sets, where no drawers or doors opened and the fixtures were all fake. I recall one day clearing up my studio and thinking how useful some large shallow drawers would be to store my drawings and prints. Later that day, throwing my rubbish in the compactor downstairs, there, abandoned on the dock, were two custom made perfect cabinets with eight drawers a piece. Confirming that indeed they were being thrown away, onto a dolly, up in the elevator, within minutes they were in my studio. Later, as I cleaned the insides I found several new, beautiful silk ties stuck at the back of the drawers…they must have been display drawers for a clothing company but now they hold years of my accumulated art works on paper.

Tenants have come and gone but some original artists remain at 202 and we have been successful fighting to preserve green space in the neighbourhood and promoting responsible development by the High Tech industries taking over the area. Somehow we are the guardians of the spirit of Marconi-Alexandra. Like this exhibition, INSIDE-OUTSIDE . Artists are truly our collective memory.

Trevor Goring artist