Kensington Market has always been more than a neighborhood—it is a living archive of migration, resilience, and reinvention. In Kensington Market:Getting Over, Wayne Salmon turns his lens toward this storied enclave of Toronto, tracing its layers of memory and change. His photographs are not nostalgic documents of a disappearing past, but rather meditations on the Market’s ongoing transformation—its shifting rhythms, its contested spaces, and the ways communities adapt and endure.
Salmon’s perspective is both intimate and critical. He captures the Market’s textures—the murals, the storefronts, the passing faces—as fragments of a larger narrative about belonging and survival in an urban landscape. In his work, Kensington becomes a site where histories of displacement, struggle, and joy overlap.
This exhibition invites viewers to consider not only the Market’s visible surfaces, but also the unseen forces that shape it. In Wayne Salmon’s vision, Kensington Market becomes less a place on a map than a state of becoming—a reminder that the struggle to “get over” is itself a testament to endurance, creativity, and community.
-Curators, The Cardinal Gallery
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
“Getting Over”, looks to, or through, the Blues.
Across the African Atlantic, Blues are powerful and sacred symbols in a host of cultural practices: Obeah, Kumina and Rastafarian traditions in Jamaica, Shango and Spiritual Baptism in Trinidad, Vodun in Haiti, Santeria in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil, and, of course, the music of Black America.
The Blues is a philosophy of resilience, perseverance and transformation.
The Blues is also poetry, creativity, love, laughter and joy. The Blues is Black life, worked with.
This series started in 2000, when I began accompanying my mother on her weekly pilgrimage to Kensington Market. She had introduced me to the market decades before, when I had just arrived as a child from the Caribbean.
The market of that era reminded me of the markets back home—not so much in the way it looked, but in the way it felt: its rhythms, the vibe. There was something about the way people functioned in the market; they operated with a degree of authenticity and freedom not seen elsewhere in the city. My mother, for example, was very much herself in the market. She exhibited the familiar strength and authority I was accustomed to at home. At any other place however—particularly when she visited my school and spoke to the principal and my teachers—she appeared the opposite of the woman I knew. Perhaps it was an issue of language, class, perhaps even gender.
After my mother’s passing in 2017, I continued the ritual of visiting the market, to buy groceries, to lime with friends, or simply to retrace the familiar routes we travelled together. The market became another world of memories. I came to occupy there a new sense of belonging.
The market is a freedom place and a memory space.
The images here were made with a Holga camera and printed with the cyanotype and gum bichromate processes. With its inherent imperfections, its vague grasp of reality, this camera sees the world the way I imagine memory sees itself. By working with alternative processes like gum bichromate, it allows one to interpret the negatives in a manner similar to how a jazz musician improvises on a written score—there are moments of intervention that may lead to something unpredictable, something new.
