The Mother City is a series of new media typological works that juxtapose built form as conceived by architects, with built form as experienced by the individual. Each installment represents cities across Canada and the United States using the architectural section as its medium for the exploration of urban form and experience.

The first object in the series, The Impossibility of Understanding in the Path of a Torontonian, is a mixed-media piece that depicts the trajectories of three individuals living in three different regions of Toronto. Simultaneously, it displays a section of Toronto from one edge of the metropolis to the other. Our experience of Toronto does not resemble the edge-to-edge musings of the urban scholars and practitioners that are played out in this last section. Rather it is the isolated, stunted, and extended reality of the city occupied; we sit stationary at stoplights and accelerate on expressways, sit motionless on park benches and run swiftly to appointments.

Via sectional representation, The Impossibility of Understanding offers an opportunity to witness the form of the city as a whole, providing an entry point for understanding the relationships of its fragments. It also gives insight into the ways that individuals experience and conceive of the enormity that is the metropolis.