THE NEW NATURE
Artist's Statement composed on the occasion of 1er Seminario de Arquitectura y Pensamiento, Valencia, Spain

Central London in the rain, its red brick walls covered with moss and lichen. Driving into Montreal, past rusting traintracks strewn with graffiti. Munich in the summertime, kebab shops and beer gardens, vast boulevards teeming with pedestrians. Ibiza town, its houses hanging like cormorant's nests over the sea. Belize City, made of wood and tropical heat. With each new city I visit, new ideas present themselves, and they coalesce into paintings. Each informs the other, only rarely do the pieces specifically reference a particular location, such as Further Unmanned Strategies (London), Saint Henri (Montreal), or Unfinished Cathedral (Barcelona), they are more likely to be maps of invisible cities, occasionally overlaid with landmarks - Central Station, for example, tries to capture the nexus between entry and exit points, whereas Passing Over and Control Room address the security and military complexes that dwell just below conscious awareness, protecting the citizenry from their nightmares in exchange for the suspension of the right to privacy.

To me, the most radical architectural gesture in recent times was Sao Paolo City Council's decision to ban billboards in public space in the city. I admire the bravery of Sao Paolo to resist what is proposed as inevitable. By eliminating advertising, they open the opportunity for their citizens to have their own daydreams, uncontaminated by advertising's intrusion into our thoughts. What we formerly called public space has been auctioned off to corporations, for use as a forum in which to compete for our attention by stimulating our unconscious desires and weaknesses. Toronto's Dundas Square, ostensibly a North American version of a Zócalo, is perhaps the most oppressive space in the city, utterly devoid of nature, and surrounded by multi-storey LED displays. Here, competition between brands becomes a cooperative endeavour to both tranquilize dissent and stimulate private appetites in the service of capital. The architecture has become mercury-like, soft and malleable according to advertisers' perception of the shifting desires of its captive audience. Must architecture destroy (human) nature?

I grew up in the country and the city, in North America and in Europe, and have witnessed massive transformation, particularly with regard to the rapid growth of Toronto as an urban centre. During the decade I spent driving between my studio in the heart of the city and Everdale farm, I saw fields sectioned off into quarter-acre lots, sewage pipes arrive, roads roughed in, workers' vans parked outside half-finished houses, until one day the previously fertile farmland has been irrevocably transformed into a suburban subdivision, with roads and highway arteries delivering 'fresh' produce on trucks from California.

I have never believed in the artificial division of space into urban and rural, where the role of the rural is merely to provide the food that urban spaces do not produce – it diminishes the shared responsibility we all have to be self-reliant and respectful of the land and what we grow on it, both agriculturally and architecturally. Small scale farming in an urban environment creates a connection with real life - the seasons and cycles of nature, cooperative work with one's neighbours - and is a start at removing the most essential element in life from the inequalities of the marketplace, providing all citizens with access to fresh food, regardless of class or status.

Airports, harbours, and other points of entry hold a particular fascination for me. As much as architecture and the city dominates my work, what I am trying to capture is not a fixed place and time so much as the flux of people, ideas, and goods in movement. The human drama plays out in the transformation of a city from one phase in its history to the next, old buildings replaced by new, migrating populations, no matter where you look, there is evidence of people in motion. The story of an entire city, indeed the entire world, can be found in a single neighbourhood. My paintings strive to position the city in the larger context of nature, since almost every city was founded by water, in the midst of ample farmland, or in a strategic high point – nature shapes our ambitions. There is perhaps something utopian in my work, but I seek to excavate our recent history to find a way forward, rather than imposing the fetish of the new.

A "tag cloud" refers to user-generated tags to describe the content of a webpage, and I chose it as the title for this painting because it is a thoroughly contemporary term. Tag Cloud is an attempt to mark and catalogue the individual elements of an urban space in the same manner that users tag Web content, space that is continually shifting and transforming, growing in seemingly chaotic ways that on closer inspection follow certain patterns. I also like the idea of a 'cloud' in the sense that it is intangible and evocative of daydreams, again it is my intent to encourage the viewer to be open to endless interpretations and freedom of imagination.

I am proud to have this painting represent the grand ideas that are being explored in this conference, and would like to thank Miriam Bermejo and the University of Architecture of Valencia for selecting this work.

Christian McLeod
Toronto