KATHLEEN HEARN

Video with sound, 8 minutes. 2025

link to video: https://vimeo.com/1085472502

43.62783, -79.42013 (West Island Landscape)is a short film featuring seven trees that once stood on the West Island of Ontario Place. The work is a portrait of place; it is also about memory, trees, the use and development of land, the environment, and our relationship to the natural world.

As a child of the 1970s, you could say I grew up with Ontario Place. I have early memories of bumper boats and super slides. As an adult, I remember trees, bike rides, walks, sunsets, and swims at the beach. Once billed as a “Once in a lifetime, never-before place,” 1 this one-time urban forest is now gone—a non-place.

The video was filmed at night over several weeks in late October 2023. A few months later, the final gates were locked, and by early October 2024, all 850 trees had been destroyed.

Trees are time made manifest. Citing the last lines from Ian Hamilton Finlay’s 1979 poem Arbre (Tree) trees are:

Roots
Years
Songs
Rings

In the video, the trees stand as sentinels between land and sky. As they are no longer there, the recording bears witness to their loss. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes asserts that the image is what “has been,” as it captures a fleeting moment that can never be recaptured—each viewing allows us to mourn as we confront the dead once again.

1. Lyric from:  Theme from Ontario Place by D Claman · 1971 — Date 1971. Authors Claman, Dolores [composer] Morris, Richard [lyricist]. Publisher Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Thompson Publishing, 1971

Song 1: Sky/Clouds/Birds is a score for music.  Over several months, I photographed birds floating on a canopy of wires in the sky while walking along a path under the hydro field close to my home. Miming sheet music, the lines within the images are rotated horizonal and centered to the page.  Birds become notes.  Clouds and sun indicators of tone.  The pace of pages and the pause between images become moments for breath. Referencing Satie, the landscape turned music is to be played in free time without measure, or bar divisions. The score is an open invitation for the player to create their own rhythm.  I intend a depiction of time and the relationship of sound to landscape. - 2023

Link to video of performance at La Clinica (Oaxaca, 2025): https://vimeo.com/1098585136

Between us, is about how ecology, time, and migration are interconnected. Made in collaborated with the Yodoquinsi Group, the final audio work emulates a conversation between two swallows (hirunda rústica) through the song of ocarina. The correlational process with others implies time, experience, attention, and appreciation of what happens. 

“The Kindergarten Without Walls” is a nonprofit community art and education space dedicated to serving the children of local communities, with a particular focus on migrant worker populations. Providing a haven for children, the kindergarten has been instrumental in organizing numerous programs and activities, with support from families, voluntary educators, psychotherapists, art practitioners, social workers, and the broader society. Since 2022, the kindergarten has hosted the annual “The Kindergarten without Walls Children's Art Festival,” presenting over thirty projects collaboratively created by participants alongside the children. Additionally, the festival highlights activities and shows curated entirely by the children. The kindergarten and the art festival have received widespread recognition in both art and public media spheres. Notably, the kindergarten was honored with the prestigious 2023 Child-Friendly Design Award at the inaugural Child-Friendly Expo in China.

Erik Satie from “Memoirs of an Amnesic”:

An artist must organize his life. Here is the exact timetable of my daily activities:

I rise at 7:18; am inspired from 10:23 to 11:47. I lunch at 12:11 and leave the table at 12:14. A healthy ride on horseback round my domain follows from 1:19 P.M. to 2:53 P.M. Another bout of inspiration from 3:12 to 4:07 P.M. From 4:27 to 6:47 P.M. various occupations (fencing, reflection, immobility, visits, contemplation, dexterity, swimming, etc.)

Dinner is served at 7:16 and finished at 7:20 P.M. From 8:09 to 9:59 P.M. symphonic readings (out loud). I go to bed regularly at 10:37 P.M. Once a week, I wake up with a start at 3:19 (Tuesdays).

My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, grated bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coconuts, chicken cooked in white water, fruit-mould, rice, turnips, camphorated sausages, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their skin). I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with the juice of the Fuchsia. I am a hearty eater, but never speak while eating, for fear of strangling. 

I breathe with care (a little at a time). I very rarely dance. When walking, I clasp my sides, and look steadily behind me.

My expression is very serious; when I laugh it is unintentional, and I always apologize most affably.

I sleep with only one eye closed, very profoundly. My bed is round, with a hole to put my head through. Once every hour a servant takes my temperature and gives me another.

I have subscribed for some time to a fashion magazine. I wear a white cap, white stockings, and a white waistcoat.

My doctor has always told me to smoke. Part of his advice runs: “Smoke away, dear chap; if you don’t someone else will.”

Made across a two season residency in Dawson City, Night Walk [Cassidy], 1:23:48 – 2:14:11 AM is a book work comprising of images of hiding places popular amongst local youth for private and group gatherings function as intimate portraits and a mapping of place, time and nature as site for narrative possibilities. Intentionally cinematic, the images are lit with a single flashlight to reference the threat of nature in teen horror films and nature seen as site of liberation in coming of age stories. Grouped and spaced the images imply with the pace of walking.

This work was made with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and as part of a two-season residency project with the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City, Yukon.

The Crossing is real time video of the landscape and ferry connecting East and West Dawson.

The camera observes the passing time of the river, the time of the land, the time of the day, and the time of the ferry.  Rocks quietly stand still, the river moves, the light fades and the ferry goes back and forth.  We wait while watching.  In the work I am interested in time, time’s plurality, and our awareness of it.  The work is part of an ongoing investigation into the use of time, soliloquy, and landscape as interlude in Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves.

This work was made with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and as part of a two-season residency project with the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City, Yukon. 

Link to video:
https://vimeo.com/1098578489

The pandemic was a game changer for much of the way I work. Constant travel turned into investigations of the local - long walks and hidden spaces. The ravines, often hidden, with their chaotic mass of indigenous and invasive species caught my attention. Walks turned into explorations - resulting in a series of large photographs of these often neglected spaces.

For this work I was interested in investigating my own cultured relationship to the land, place, myth, and representation of Canada.  This work marks a shift in my practice which is often community and media based.  The project reflects on the visual and cultural construction of landscape as tied to nationalism, identity and to experiment with studio-based photographs of manufactured landscape representations.  Constructed in studio these photographs of maquettes of landscape stage sets, built by theatre prop technicians and lit with dramatic stage lighting are inspired by iconic images from the group of seven, tourism promotion and NFB archives.  This work is a personal journey to examine and critique settler perpetuated ideas of terra nullius and power over land as part of national identity. 

Works in the exhibition generated by a list of instructions given by artist peers.

1.     Photograph the mother tree.

2.     Photograph gravity.

3.     Photograph love.

4.     Photograph spontaneous combustion.

5.     Photograph an in-between space.

6.     Photograph memory.

7.     Photograph a computer.

8.     Photograph a feeling.

9.     Photograph sitting with the moon.

10.  Photograph a student.

11.  Photograph the space between two prisons.

12.  Photograph a broken thing that is still useful.

13.  Photograph something you are trying to ignore.

14.  Photograph the space between a mother and a daughter.

15.  Photograph a hammer.

16.  Photograph Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus 1920.

17.  Photograph low contrast.

18.  Photograph something lost.

19.  Photograph the back of something.

20.  Photograph the future.

21.  Photograph an object inside another object.

22.  Photograph faux neon.

23.  Photograph an insignificant moment from a favourite film.

24.  Photograph a sign of the times.

Shot in Skagastrond, a small town of 500 on the north coast of Iceland the photographs and videos depicts local youth performing themselves for the landscape. The work plays with notions of documentary by recording of teen rituals (often car based) and teen performances in the landscape. Part portrait, part landscape, part cultural commentary the work observes and collects experiences of youth living in a remote community.

This series of encounters and collaborations are part of a two year residency project in Ndar (St. Louis) Senegal with a focus on local youth. Working with NBS (New Black Scorpion) dance group, teen musicians and skaters from Kronic Roller Family a series of images, sounds, projects and performances were created with support of the Institute Francaise, The Factory and WAAW residency.

The Warriors explores globalized youth culture as it plays out in the streets of Saint-Louis. Focusing on the Inline Skate group KRONIC Roller Family, the work, choreographed by members, records Abrame, Abou and Theirno and their peers as they perform against the backdrop of the city. In the video, members of KRONIC circle the island, looping through the streets as they mark out their territory while sounds of the city mix with sounds of their wheels cutting against the road. The sounds fluxes between the opposing forces of closeness and distance by playing back and forth between the sounds of the performers and those of the landscape. In their performance, the group blends elements of local and imported culture to perform their hybrid identity and sub-culture that is uniquely Saint-Louisienne.

2016
HD Video. Run time 5:30.

Link to video:
https://vimeo.com/208590988

Imagined Landscapes are a series of images generated from a workshop on portrait and landscape at Factoria in Havana Cuba (2018). All drawings were drawn by the photographed participant.

PORTRAITS

Los Chicos is part of an ongoing series of portraits made in the San Agustin community.

2014 - Ongoing

Los Chicos de 250 is a four part short film, formatted in the fragmented style of tele-novella story telling. It is the culmination of a year long project in San Agustin, Cuba where I worked with nearly 50 youth to tell their stories. San Agustin is a community on the outskirts of Havana constructed post-revolution to house the displaced. The film interweaves the stories of a group of teens, living on or near the main road Street 250, as they reenact moments of their experience as they enter adulthood. In the work we encounter the stories of Karla, Sahara, Melissa and Angel along with their friends, confidants, co-conspirators and antagonists told within the context and frame of the San Agustin landscape. The stories range from confronting sexuality, loss of innocence, gender and the desire for agency in a politically complicated context.



2015. HD Video, Run Time: 30:00

In Argentina, age 15 is the year of Fiesta de Quince: the year that young girls become young women, a point in time when their “coming of age” is recognized. My interest in this transition led to 15 a collaboration with students close to the age of Quince from La Plata, Buenos Aires Home Institute. Starting with the questions: what does it mean to be an adult?, what are some the struggles of being a teen?, and how are these situations represented in media?, teenage girls Giuliana, Milagros, and Valentina selected a television character and situation they felt embodied characteristics and circumstance that paralleled their own. The selected scenes highlight Rachel from Glee dealing with loss and disappointment, Mar from Casi Angeles (an Argentine teen soap) dealing with the ups and downs of love, and Mora from Solamente Vos (also an Argentine teen soap opera) struggling with her family and her desire for autonomy.

2014
HD Video
Run Time: 8:15

Link to video:
https://vimeo.com/90640288

The Boys interweaves conversations from iconic coming of age films (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Stand By Me, The River's Edge, Rebel Without a Cause) into a new teen drama. Taking a closer look at male bonding on screen; the film's characters struggle with identity, their place in the world, and what it means to be an adult. Josh wants the girl and Chris wants out. Over the course of the day Chris dishes five and dime advice to Josh who so desperately wants to be grown-up; in the end though it’s Josh who guides Chris towards the man he wants to be.

2014
HD Video
Run Time: 13:30

Link to video:
https://vimeo.com/104758805

The photographic series The Detectives references classic Hardy Boy novels to look at male bonding and the role of fictional bildungsroman stories in the shaping of what it means to be a man.

2012.
30 x 40" Digital Prints

So Long… repositions scenes from the 1993 cult classic film Dazed and Confused into a contemporary context. Using non-actors born approximately at the time the original film was made, the new work creates a contrast of then and now. The borrowed scenes highlight the similarities and differences of the past thirty years to create a strange déjà vu and feature the ongoing awkwardness of teenage life and the struggle for authenticity.

2011
HD Video
Run Time: 5:00

Link to video:
https://vimeo.com/88542384

In Eat ‘Em and Smile three young artists translate the 1984 chart topper Jump from rock anthem to a nostalgic love ballad. Performed in audition style, the work highlights the tensions between performer and public and reflects the culture of fame and stardom in our youth obsessed culture.
2009
HD Video
Run Time: 12:30
Link to video:
https://vimeo.com/88543637

These photos were made during 2013-2016, a period when Ontario Place was closed to the public. Accessed by the lake, these images were made out of curiosity to what happens when a once iconic space is left and shuttered.

On going collection of images related to scouting film locations.