" For Lachine Canal : Past and Present, I studied Yvon Desloges and Alain Gelly’s book The Lachine Canal, Riding the Waves of Industrial and Urban Development 1860-1950 to get a better understanding of the people who settled in the Lachine Canal region, the technology they used, and the goods they manufactured. I created this exhibition to compare how the canal looked in the mid to late 1800s to how it appears today. For me, the value of studying history is the insight we gain into human nature and our past. In reflection we can learn how we may improve upon the way we do things in the future.[...] What I have tried to represent in The Lachine Canal: Past and Present is a comparative study of the canal’s past and present, focussing not simply on the canal and the surrounding architecture but on the memory and history of the people and companies who built the neighbourhoods that we know today as Lachine, LaSalle, Verdun, St- Henri, Côte Saint Paul, Griffintown, Little Burgundy, Point St-Charles, and the port of Old Montreal." -- p. [6, 8]
