David Scriven

(Re)Visiting Family

I grew up in a house owned by my mother’s father, near where she grew up with her brother and two sisters.  It was a close-knit neighbourhood - school, variety store, and park close by. My mother has long passed. Her remaining sister told me how the family would often walk to my great-grandparents’ house arriving in their backyard through a picket fence from the same park where I later played. I didn’t know my great-grandparents. I do remember as a boy visiting my aunt for her daughter’s first birthday party - a memory I recently revisited with my young cousin’s untimely passing. Revisiting the walk my mother’s family made, I was amazed to find a gate (now metal) to where my great-grandparents lived. I was also moved to realize that my aunt would have passed the house where, many years later, she first lived with her only child.

David Scriven is a lens-based emerging artist living in Toronto. Using cameras inherited from his father and grounded in documentary photography, his photographs have explored decay and renewal in the urban ecosystem. Common Ground, an ongoing project, emerged out of ancestry research started during the COVID-19 pandemic. Images from this series were recently featured in the online Montreal-based magazine Carte Blanche, Issue 46.  He has exhibited work at the MacKendrick Community Gallery, Artscape Youngplace, Gallery 44 Centre of Contemporary Photography in Toronto, as well as ViewPoint Gallery in Halifax. In November 2021, he self-published a photo book entitled Alexandra Park that captured a year in the complete demolition and rebuild of the Toronto west-end community housing project.

Contact the artist directly for information on purchasing.

Contact: Dscriven57@gmail.com
Website: davidscrivenphotography.com
IG: @davidalbertscriven

May 15 to May 26th, 2024
918 Bathurst Street, Toronto
Sun and Star Rooms

Hours: Wednesday - Sunday, 12pm to 5pm
Opening reception: Thursday, May 16th from 6-9pm
Artist talk: Saturday, May 18th from 1-3pm