Gone are the days of community dances, lunches in the field, and straw-stuffed couches. In the early 20th century, family homes could be found on nearly every quarter-mile section of land across Canada’s heartland. Now, roughly one house exists for every five square miles. In the broken down barns and crumbling porches, in the twisting doorways of empty farmhouses that were once someone’s dream, the cruelty of time, of human use and neglect, of forgotten lives , becomes undeniable. Life’s impermanence, in such places, is no longer imaginable but real. Even in winter I am drawn to the vast, open landscape of the prairies that appears almost lifeless – perhaps, because life, in such places, is the most stubborn and prominent of facts. In a bewildering stillness and silence, Wattles and Daub explores a growing graveyard of what is considered Canada’s greatest generation.