About the artists and their work
Susan Detwiler is a contemporary visual artist, educator and writer. Her work Green Cleaning House raises questions about the industrial transformation of nature into toxic waste." Detwiler makes a shelter frame for growing edible plants from household cleaning tools. These utensils, brooms, swiffers and mops are on display as if they can clean the waters of the bay.

Tor Lukasik-Foss is a Hamilton area visual artist and musician whose work re-conceptualizes the idea of the "performance stage." The floating sculpture Viking Soliloquy Chair transforms a sinking Viking burial ship into a piece of floating stage furniture, useful for all manner of doleful Shakespearian monologues, acapella Wagnerian wailing, and/or Becketesque chatter.

Steve Mazza is a sculptor who has spent his entire life on the waters of Hamilton Harbour. His piece considers “what it means to live in an industrial city, in an industrial province, in a country that doesn't seem to want to be industrial anymore." By incubating the industrial (Stelco and Dofasco) into a green house structure, Steve Mazza pays homage to the places where the people of Shacktown worked. His works plays on the notion that industry is an anachronism to be museumed as well as providing a safe place for industrial pollutants to be contained.

David Acheson and Noel Harding create work that is preoccupied with the merging of sculpture to landscape, landscape to sculpture. Both artists are fascinated by the human consideration to manipulate and shape nature to an imagined ideal. In the work romance park for endangered turtles 2008 Turtle basking platforms, water aeration, wetland plantings provide a theatrical stage. Their islands arise in an artifice of technology as transplanted tools toward real environmental engagement. Artist Noel Harding has been working for several years on technologies that address the role of nature in the midst of contemporary urbanization. He is most noted for his Elevated Wetlands Project and his work with green roof elevations (Green Corridor Project).

About the Curator:
Nora Hutchinson is a video and performance artist who as exhibited nationally and internationally, as well as a producer, writer and composer. She holds a BA in Music and a MFA from the University of Guelph and has recently produced the operatic performance work In Safe Places.

Hamilton Artists Inc. is committed to the presentation, dissemination and support of contemporary visual arts practice in Canada. The centre seeks to reflect the concerns of emerging and mid-career artists within the context of both a local and larger national discourse. The centre presents a diverse range of multidisciplinary programming with a primary focus on emerging aesthetics in contemporary art including: installation, painting, photography, graphic arts, video, performance and new media. The centre pays artist fees for all selected exhibitions, programs and curatorial initiatives and supports the processes of working artists by providing them with an accessible forum which acts as a social backdrop for their artistic investigations. The centre empowers artists and cultural producers by supplying them with necessary resources and a cooperative working environment, which facilitates artistic freedom of expression.