Soundings: Lost Villages

In 1958, ten Loyalist Ontario communities known as the Lost Villages were flooded to build the Saint Lawrence Seaway and the Moses-Saunders Power Dam. Heritage waterfront towns on the St. Lawrence River near Cornwall were erased, their buildings removed and the land scraped flat before the rising river engulfed it — an event later known as Inundation Day. Exiled from their communities, more than 6,500 people and 530 buildings were relocated off the river to a barren, featureless landscape in the newly built towns of Ingleside and Long Sault. Yet what endured for these patriotic Loyalists was a profound yearning for the world they had left behind.

Through an immersive blend of sound and large-scale photographic imagery, lens-based artist Stephen Della Casa invites visitors to step into a history pushed into silence, communities sacrificed in the name of progress. This site-specific installation, featuring works such as River Portal and Radiant Shoreline, transforms archival memory into a sensory experience where recordings of the landscape and the remnants of human presence echo through the gallery.

Visitors are encouraged to listen closely and look carefully, tracing how the present-day soundscape of wetlands, birdsong and leisure on the river overlays a vanished world of rapids, rushing water and daily community life. These seemingly natural sounds are, in fact, constructions of a manufactured landscape, replacing the settler colonial voices of the river. In experiencing this work, visitors are invited to hold both soundscapes in mind — the lost and the present — and to reflect upon how resilience, memory and authoritative normalcy endure long after the waters rose.

The Art Gallery of Northumberland
On View from 6 September – 2 November 2025
Artist Talk: 25 October, 1:00 p.m.

Exhibition Publication, Soudings: Lost Villages, published by the AGN, available here