About
TH&B is the creative partnership of Simon Frank, Dave Hind, Ivan Jurakic, and Tor Lukasik-Foss, recycling the moniker of the defunct railway which once serviced the Toronto, Hamilton, and Buffalo rail corridor. The team is a collaborative authorship that produces sculptures, installations, and actions that respond to and often trespass upon the awkward transitional zones between rural, urban, and post-industrial environments.
TH&B’s work has evolved in response to the bifurcated environment surrounding us: the Rust Belt that borders the Great Lakes basin. We are intrigued and inspired by the Great Lakes as a symbol and a sign of both a critical environmental watershed bordering the United States and Canada and a site of urban, rural and industrial interconnectivity in a broad region with a built environment that accommodates a population approaching 10 million people. We are committed to exploring the complex ways in which we revere, exploit, and disturb this natural wonder. Over the course of our creative output as a collective, we have utilized symbols that represent this geography: the swallow tail crest of the Toronto, Hamilton Buffalo (TH&B) rail logo and the silhouette of the Great Lakes. These symbols have allowed us to make a wide range of projects that speak to the complexities of the shared ecological, industrial, urban, and social activities that take place upon this terrain. Our hope is that by activating these symbols in novel ways that they invite participants to reconsider this readily recognizable topography as a powerful emblem of environmental and anthropogenic transformation.
Since 2012, TH&B has realized several sculptures and site-specific installations that address this premise. The most successful of these have incorporated a performative and communal action as part of a larger collective outdoor work. Many of these social actions center around campfires, cast-iron pans and open air cooking, with a recent expansion into food foraging and processing.
(photo courtesy Banko Creative Media)