Lot 42

Patrick Dunford was born and raised in Winnipeg, MB, and completed his MFA at Concordia University in Montreal. His practice explores themes of deindustrialization through his sustained focus on trains and abandoned railway infrastructure. Painted from a bird’s eye perspective, his works depict empty rail lines snaking across parched terrain and through the deteriorating streets of fading cities, evoking spaces suspended between memory and obsolescence. While these sites might conventionally be read through registers of loss or decay, Dunford resists a purely melancholic framing. Instead, he approaches these environments as sites of quiet possibility, where nature gradually reasserts itself within human-altered systems. His work suggests a cautious optimism: that fragmented industrial landscapes hold the potential for ecological return and transformation.

Grounded in places the artist has lived in and travelled through with his family, Dunford’s paintings reflect a personal geography of observation and return. His elevated vantage point underscores a reflective distance, allowing for a broader consideration of industrial progress, its residues, and nature’s persistent capacity to reclaim space. In doing so, his work both humanizes industrial landscapes and reveals the slow, ongoing negotiation between built environments and the natural world.