Christopher McNamara recently installed two pieces, "Find a New City 1" and "Find a New City 2," in the exhibit "Conversations: Windsor Essex Triennial of Contemporary Art."  McNamara’s recent projects have included stereoscopic video works with long takes of cities and towns that are close to his heart. Along the way, he has also been constructing multi-media dioramas and sound pieces that contemplate the city as a complicated site. For McNamara, it begins with a romantic notion of what the city promises while acknowledging that the city continues to be a fraught and contested site. The forces of gentrification are only one of those challenges – as class and race shape the increasing depiction of cities as zones of conflict. In the midst of all this, the small details of the city get overlooked and overwritten. As McNamara has continued with these ruminations, another awareness has emerged for him – which undermines or counters the poet Carl Sandburg's notion of a city of “big shoulders”. For McNamara, the city is a site that is also resolutely feminine  – where there is a re-imagining or re-conception of notions of cosmopolitanism and pluralism. With that shift, one can imagine space for hope or optimism. If we permit it.