Mark Coatsworth’s photos of tired spaces hang at Impressions.
Art Story

Mark Coatsworth
NOW highlights exceptional shows at the Contact photography festival
By David Jager

WHAT: Abandon, at Impressions Art Gallery (102 Yorkville, 416-922-3944), to June 7.

WHY: Post-apocalyptic shots taken in New Orleans, Detroit, the Maritimes and the Far North show abandoned amusement parks, decayed parking garages and other forbidding off-limits environments hit by environmental, industrial or economic disaster.

Coatsworth ventures past the no-trespassing signs to a rarely seen alternative wilderness. His photos of a New Orleans school two years after Katrina, Detroit’s ghostly downtown core and piles of abandoned junk in Inuvik take a sobering and poetically stark look at the rusted underbelly of North American capitalism.

BUZZ: A self-made photojournalist who started out documenting the Canadian heavy metal and country music scenes, Coatsworth’s focus turned to abandoned urban spaces during a three-month solo trek through the Canadian Arctic.

NOW | May 22-29, 2008 | VOL 27 NO 38
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