Favourite Foote Photos: Shawna Dempsey

I think I remember the night the Leland Hotel burned down.

Or at least the morning after.

But all of the fires, all of the buildings lost, run together in my mind.

In Winnipeg things vanish so quickly.

A building is demolished and then it is hard to remember exactly what it looked like.

Its edges, in memory, are blurry.

Still, we persist in naming locations by their ghost-names. "Where shall we meet?" Perhaps at William and King, which will always be "Where the Leland was" or Higgins and Main, "Where the Savoy was" or across from the CPR, "Where the Royal Alex was."

It is nice to be reminded these places actually existed through photos such as this one, rather than being mere figments of a collective dream.

- Shawna Dempsey


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Shawna Dempsey is a performance artist, curator, and Co-Director of Mentoring Artists for Women's Art.