Cat Marchese - Citybonez

Cat is an ardent creative, a drummer and inventive photographer with a passion for reviving history. She’s always been fascinated by forsaken institutions, crumbling buildings, derelict hotels and abandoned cities. These once elaborate and peopled places - their ghostly bones - are as intriguing to her as their shed historical skin. Cat turned her love for the past into an innovative art venture and historical revival.

Citybonez™ pays photographic homage to our stately skeleton, building blocks manufactured by brickyards dating back to 1889, offering a glimpse into our collective architecture. Cat discovered her reverence for historical bricks in 2020, during the isolation forced upon us by the COVD-19 pandemic. In search of solitude and purpose, she hit the pavement exploring and digging through the cast-offs from dilapidated buildings and landfill, exhuming the mud bones of our city. 

Cat’s images preserve relics from John Price Brick Maker on Greenwood Avenue, the Milton Pressed Brick Company in Milton, and the Don Valley Brick Works, which produced bricks in ten shades of red, seven shades of buff, olive gold, brown obsidian and mottled for such venerable landmarks as Massey Hall, Casa Loma, the Ontario Legislature and the University of Toronto's Hart House and Convocation Hall.  

In times of uncertainty, Cat finds solace from the present by unearthing the past. But more than this, these bricks – these beautiful bones of our evolving city – provide comfort. There is consolation in the planned impermanence of our built environment; in the predictable and continuous cycle of human destruction and creation.