“I’ve been coming here for a long time; they serve pretty progressive Italian food. I’m a big lover of Italian cuisine for the emphasis on the ingredients and the fact they avoid over embellishing. I love to cook too but for my last meal, as it’s an occasion, I don’t want to cook it – I just want to eat it. I’d invite my best friends and my daughters – a group of 10 or something like that.

I enjoy company when I’m dining. I host a lot of dinners, I like to bring people together, sometimes just talking around new ideas or when finishing up a project. While I’m in Toronto I usually host a dinner like that once a month.

My parents immigrated to Canada from the Ukraine after the Second World War. Sometimes for breakfast my mother would make pierogi, which are a type of cheese and potato-filled dumplings. On special occasions she would dice up bacon and put it in a frying pan, then she’d throw the pierogi in until they got a little brown and add a bit of sour cream. I remember they were to die for.

When I was 11 my father had a camera but I was never allowed to use it – it was his camera. But one day he saw a sales ad by a widow of an amateur photographer; this man had all the tools, the film and the how-to books. He also had three cameras: one of them a 35mm Minolta. My dad bought it all, gave the camera to me and said, ‘here you go, there’s yours’. I was so excited, I went outside; it was wintertime and I shot 36 pictures of my dog jumping in the snow because I wanted to get through a roll of film. I processed the film with the help of our neighbour who was a photo-club member and it was like magic.

I moved to Toronto in 1976 when I was 21 to study at Ryerson. My breakthrough moment was probably in the early 1980s when I was moving away from straight landscape and began to look at man-altered landscape. In 1983 I went on a rafting trip on the Thompson River in Western Canada and I saw these incredible canyon walls with rail carts on both sides of the canyon. I was interested in how we shape the planet and how we’re a resource-based country – and this is how we’d moved the resources out. It’s not necessarily a celebration nor an indictment but a consideration.

I’ve always believed that at the core of what I do in my art is to try find meaning in places that we often discard. At the end of the day as an artist I’m still trying to tell a story, a narrative. At this point it’s about the human relationship to the planet – a big and important story because we have one planet and if we screw it up it’s not like we’re going to find another one anytime soon.”