“Petrie Island has become the adopted home I was denied as a child.” Michael Ricco writes that in an artist statement on his website. That sentence sets the tone for Petrie Island: A Fostering Place, his exhibition of large-format landscape photography installed along the pedestrian concourse at Rideau Station, on view at Corridor 45|75 from July 11 to October 11, 2026, turning that single sentence into a full body of large-format landscape photography, work that asks Ottawa commuters to think about a wetland most of them have never visited.
The exhibition speaks directly to two United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Life on Land and Sustainable Cities and Communities. Ricco’s photographs document shoreline erosion, water-level regulation, and development pressure on one of Ottawa’s most fragile natural spaces, the kind of habitat loss the first goal addresses. Installing that documentation inside a busy transit station, rather than a gallery someone has to plan a visit to, is what makes the second goal relevant: it puts environmental awareness directly in the path of people who never intended to encounter it that day.
Ricco’s connection to Petrie Island did not start with a camera. In his own words, he calls himself “an anomaly” as both a person and an artist. Before he was born, one parent wanted him aborted; within days of his birth, the other surrendered him to the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto on a nun’s advice. He spent his entire childhood and teenage years in foster care, aging out of the system at 18. “Those years in foster care shaped my perception of reality,” he writes.
That history is what gives A Fostering Place its emotional register. In a separate statement written specifically for the Petrie Island series, Ricco describes Petrie Island’s “beauty, tranquility, and meditative ambiance” as a source of rejuvenation and says resilience is embedded directly in his photography: scenes of stillness and silence that mirror something in his own personality. Each image in the series comes from hours spent walking the island’s trails alone, he writes, and yet he says he’s never once felt lonely there. For a photographer who spent his childhood being moved between placements, a wetland that stays put season after season offers something no foster placement could: permanence.
That attachment has made Ricco one of the island’s most active protectors. He has served as president of the volunteer group Friends of Petrie Island since the 1990s and currently helps run a turtle egg incubation project alongside the Canadian Wildlife Federation and Ottawa Riverkeeper, work that has pushed hatch rates for at-risk painted, map, and snapping turtles as high as 83 per cent, according to his interview in an article with Capital Current published in 2024.
“We can’t just talk about the turtles without showing you where their home is,” Ricco told the outlet. The island itself is under real, documented strain: roughly 100 feet of shoreline have disappeared over the years to spring flooding and storm erosion, and a hydroelectric dam located downstream from Petrie Island on the Ottawa River has raised water levels enough to shrink the island further still.
None of that context is visible to most people crossing Rideau Station on their way to work. That’s the point of putting it there. A photograph of an eroding shoreline, hung where thousands of commuters pass every day, does something a nature trail 20 minutes east of downtown cannot: it interrupts a routine instead of waiting for someone to seek it out. For Ricco, that interruption carries a very personal stake. The island gave him the sense of home his childhood didn’t. His photographs are asking Ottawa to help make sure it’s still there.
Petrie Island: A Fostering Place is on view along the pedestrian concourse at Rideau Station, part of Corridor 45|75, through October 11, 2026.