Hastings Park

Hastings Park is a series of 11 colour photographs and an infrared projection installation depicting the four remaining buildings in Vancouver where over 8,000 Japanese Canadians were temporarily located and processed prior to being sent to labour and internment camps during World War II. Prior to 1942 and after the war, Hastings Park was the site of the city’s horse races and the Pacific National Exhibition (PNE) with its livestock competitions, baby pig races, demolition derby, lumberjack contests and mini donuts. 

The imagery for the photographs and infrared projection was created by a thermal imaging camera developed for the construction industry that measures the heat signatures of objects. Thermal imaging can detect subtle differences in temperature, and is especially useful in exposing leaks and fissures that would signal issues with what is beneath the surface. The different colours in the photographs show differences in the surface temperatures of the surfaces of the buildings and surrounding foliage.

For the infrared projection, a series of ten images from each location, for a total of forty images, were generated as positives and projected from a slide projector that had its incandescent bulb replaced with an infrared illuminator. These slides were cast onto a projection screen made of a specialized acrylic that blocked all visible spectrum light while allowing a very narrow band of infrared light to pass through. The screen contained a material that captured the infrared light, and thereby the projections. On the opposite end of the gallery space was an infrared camera pointed at the screen which was able to “see” the invisible images. 

This camera in turn was connected to a monitor on the wall facing the screen. When the audience walked in front of the monitor to look at the invisible projections, they also entered the view of the camera, and saw themselves on the monitor, with the infrared images behind them on the screen. However, when they turned around to look at the screen itself, it appeared dark, blank, empty.