Pleasantville

The community of Pleasantville, within the city of St. John's, Newfoundland, is hemmed in on four sides by, respectively, a golf course, an abandoned children's hospital, a chicken abattoir, and a Canadian Forces Base. The community has long been associated with military history, as the land was donated by a land owner to the government on which to train troops for World War I. In the intervening years, the Americans built Fort Pepperrell on the land, which was ceded to the Canadian military in the 1960's.

Now as the community of Pleasantville, the former army barracks have been painted with bright and pastel colours that house civilian families. A softball field now occupies land where, at one time, the Newfoundand Regiment was trained to stab enemy soldiers with bayonets.

Pleasantville is in a state of perpetual transition. The old infrastructure is crumbling while new buildings are built and old buildings are converted to new uses. The whole place feels like it has been picked up, then dropped, and everything has stayed where it fell. In the midst of military presence, industry, recreation, and bureaucracy, the community of Pleasantville and its residents go about their lives.

I am interested in Pleasantville’s architecture, both physical and social, within the context of a landscape both natural and urban. Pleasantville feels like a community on the edge of something—with no centre, but with several odd and vastly different focal points around its perimeter. There is, simultaneously, a sense of absence and a sense of presence; the place is both inhabited and abandoned. People rarely appear in the photographs, though their traces are everywhere; occasionally they, or dogs or cats or birds, reveal themselves by walking into the frame. I’m attempting to visually secure a place in flux, a place informed by, and in the process of being changed by, these tensions.