Five photographs of interiors are installed in the illuminated advertising spaces of bus shelters along bus route 2 in St. John’s, Newfoundland.  The photographs represent an emotional journey through a life-threatening illness and four seasons long recovery of my mother. During this time I took public transit on a regular basis (something I do not normally do) and the bus became an important part of this experience. Waiting for and riding the bus was an enforced pause in a time of crisis – the eye of the storm – a break from the real-time of fear, anxiety, and sadness.

Absence becomes the subject of the photographs. An attempt to investigate domestic spaces of a missed loved one whose presence is remembered in the rooms surfaces, but whose body is not found. 

The installations are sites of memory and personal meditations upon the ideas of loss but they are also meant to create a quiet intimate space inside the shelters themselves. Focused on a particular object commonly found in a person’s home, a couch, a bed, a radiator, the shelters are transformed from a public space to a personal space. By placing these images in the environment of the transit shelter the language of commercialism is appropriated and a public area becomes more humanized.