Corner Pieces

Corner Pieces is Blomgren’s follow-up to Walkups, his docudrama about Montreal apartments. Evolving out of Blomgren’s ongoing fascination with architecture, Corner Pieces finds his distinctive voice expanding out of the domestic sphere and moving onto the streets.

Composed as a series of elegies to particular places, both real and imaginary, this collection traces a cartography of desire and frustration, loss and redemption, set amidst the backdrop of the contemporary urban spectacle. Street corners, indistinct industrial zones, central business districts and public squares become sites where the ideals and failures of urban planning collide with direct, personal experience. Here, lovers make out in discreet, unused corners; protesters march the streets in a bewildered state of empowerment and sadness; a two-storey stack of towels becomes a public sculpture of religious contemplation.

Blomgren’s fictions move formally and conceptually between autobiographical vignette, sociological study, historical monument plan, architecture proposal, civic protest and love ballad, to create a psychological documentary of contemporary urban life.