Colin Lyons: Industrial Monuments

Artist Colin Lyons has brought parts of Lachine Canal to Gallery Page and Strange. The Montreal buildings---Shewing Cork Works Ltd., Ogilvie Flour Mills Co. Ltd., Dow Brewery and Canada Maltage among them---stare back at you from their miniature sculpture windows. The show is a study in industrial obsolescence---what happens to things once they become obsolete. Lyons describes arriving to work in his Montreal studio after graduating from Mount Allison University and seeing the factories along the canal. "I was just really struck by the different paths they'd taken. The Simmons Factory became these really nice art studios"---where Lyons created his art---"and the other one became a ruin"---the Maltage building. Lyons photographed as many abandoned and repurposed buildings as he could, and created printing press plates to mimic the buildings. Frustrated with the printmaking rule of putting a giant "x" through a used plate and getting rid of it, Lyons printed the paper structures, then welded the zinc plates in the form of the building they mirrored. The show has been travelling all over the country, and this Page and Strange exhibition marks Lyons' first commercial show---you can buy his work now that it's finished touring. –Holly Gordon