Photography exhibition focused on loss, history

The former Sarnia General Hospital building was destroyed by neglect, says a photographer who documented its demolition.

It’s demise was a product of years sitting empty and degrading after failed attempts to repurpose the 1890s-built structure amid ownership disputes between the City of Sarnia and Bluewater Health, break-ins, wiring thefts and military training exercises, said Leann Cotton.

“By the time they got any action on it, it was kind of past the point of a renovation or a repurposing,” she said about the GFive Inc. group of five businessmen who bought the site from the city in 2017 for $1,000 and — with $5.4 million from the city to help with demolition costs — gradually and carefully brought the behemoth down to make room for new development.

Her new exhibit for•sak•en, at the Lawrence House until April 28, focuses on that destruction and what might have been for the building that was the site of countless tears and memories, she said.

“My dad died up in that hospital and I remember that ward very vividly,” she said.

It was therapeutic, she said about paring down her collection of thousands of photos from the demolition, and from other buildings demolished in recent years, into a 17-piece collection of canvases, prints and metal prints.

“And showing people what maybe they didn’t really pay attention to until it was gone.”

The Sarnia native said she’s interested in exploring and photographing abandoned structures.

Old farmhouses off side roads in Lambton, a misbuilt and unused mausoleum near Port Dover, and a tour of abandoned buildings in Detroit that started her fascination with urban exploration are some examples, she said.

“It really got me looking at what was around Sarnia” in terms of abandoned buildings, she said about that Detroit trip in 2013.

“At that point there really wasn’t a lot, but the hospital was really intriguing,” she said.

She spent hours at a time at the Sarnia General site before demolition finished in 2018, she said, recalling some of the animal-like precision of some of the Schouten Excavating machines.

Other sites she’s documented include the Cull Drain Bridge, the former Sarnia Collegiate and St. Clair secondary buildings, the Pere Marquette Railroad Bridge in Port Huron, and since-demolished structures like the Bridge Tavern in Point Edward, Holmes Foundry, St. Patrick’s school on East Street and the Lambton Generating Station.

Some are also featured in the exhibition, though the former hospital site is the focus of the project about structures lost that, under different circumstances, might have been repurposed, she said.

“Rather than just becoming a pile of rubble.”

It’s her first exhibition, she said, juxtaposed beside a concurrent 22-piece Parks in Ontario exhibition, also at the Lawrence House, from other members of the Sarnia Photographic Club.

The parks exhibition includes provincial parks, municipal parks, wide vistas, intimate closeups, the beauty of the outdoors and pandemic restrictions, club officials said in a news release.

“I tend to shoot the more off,” Cotton said. “The demolition, the history type of photography work.”

Cotton’s photos, including ones in her exhibition, can also be seen at 500px.com/p/leanncottonand a similar exhibition of her work is heading to The Hive, a tattoo studio on Front Street in Sarnia, for the first week in May, Cotton said.

“I think it would be nice for people to come out and take a look” she said. “And look closer at what’s going on around the city, what’s going on around the county with a lot of these buildings.”

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