Jesse Colin Jackson?s exhibition at Toronto’s Pari Nadimi Gallery, Mackenzie Place (open through July 22, 2023), is a rich and inventive study of ?The Highrise? in Hay River (Xát??odehchee), Northwest Territories. Four cameras are mounted on top of the only highrise in Hay River, named Mackenzie Place, and are pointed in the four cardinal directions of the city. Four projectors transpose nearly 1 million images into the gallery space, a time-lapse that allows us to take in a day in a couple of breaths, or five years in an hour. The exhibit also features large-scale, time-collapsing, photographs and a sort of biography of the building: an album showing The Highrise from many vantage points and dispositions. A soundtrack, derived from an ethnographic text by Lindsay Bell, a former resident of Hay River, features interviews with inhabitants, offering a window into the life of the building. Jackson also features her process-oriented field notebooks as a wall piece. These anthropological dimensions are important reminders to architects that alongside what we see there are stories, and many lives.  
An Ecology of Stories
Trained as an architect, Jackson uses the field of art as a vehicle for working alongside urbanists, designers, humanists, poets, ecologists, anthropologists, computer scientists and neuroscientists to produce new ways of thinking about geographical and built situations. His previous project, Radiant City (2014), took on the legacy of Toronto?s high...