Artist: Sean Patenaude
Title: Watching the time pass by the sun
Location: McCain Complex Care and Recovery Building
1025 Queen St. West
(Level 1 - outside the Therapeutic Neighbourhood along the North/South corridor leading to the Inpatient Unit Elevators)
"My piece “watching the time pass by the sun” came from the question “how can I show what the days feel like as they go by?” So much of health and healing requires patience; it takes time to find the right treatments, medications, therapies, time to see if they work, time to build new practices, time to reenter the world. When I was asked to document the construction of the new CAMH buildings, I knew I wanted the piece to be about time.
What I learned while making the pictures was about perception. Each captured over many months, the individual images in the piece were enhanced in contrast and colour, but not digitally altered. Every line and shadow is clear to see on the original negatives, yet the effect is that of a dream or vision. The long arcs of each day’s sun, the buildings rising like ghosts, are how the simple cameras perceived the passing of time, and it reminds us that there are as many ways of seeing as there are minds to see, and that each way of seeing holds the promise of something beautiful."
-Sean Patenaude