Creation

A new mother takes us on a tour of Hamil- ton, a Rust Belt city born of the Industrial Revolution and dying a slow death due to globalization. This mother represents the city s next wave of inhabitants the artists and young parents who swarm a run-down area for its affordability, inevitably reshaping the neighborhoods they take over. Creation looks at gentrification from the inside out an artist mother making a home and neighborhood for her family, struggling to find her place amid the exist- ing and emerging communities. While pushing her child s stroller around Hamilton, Nickerson shows us the warehouse filled with open barrels of toxic sludge, the parking lot where the city s homeless population sleeps, and the re- furbished Victorian house (complete with elegant chandeliers) that is now a state- of-the-art yoga studio. Creation presents the city as a living thing a place where many small lives intersect and where death, motherhood, pollution, poverty, and violence are all interconnected. Drawn in evocative watercolor, Cre- ation is unafraid to leave questions open- ended as Nickerson wanders the city and ponders just where the personal and political intersect, and where they ought to intersect.