Institution, 1973

Visually, the painting channels the solitude and formal clarity of the cityscapes of Edward Hopper (1882–1967)—an early influence on Pratt. A row of institutional buildings rises under a pale sky, their facades rendered with rigid lines and exacting perspective. The composition draws the viewer toward a single vanishing point just off-centre, where a thin plume of steam curls from a rooftop vent. That small gesture—“included for relief,” Pratt said—is the lone sign of life in a scene otherwise suspended in stillness.

The tension of Institution emerges from its contrasts: geometry against atmosphere, mass against emptiness, a solid skyline interrupted by the brief exhale of vapour. These oppositions reflect a deeper ambivalence. Pratt was drawn to institutional spaces not out of admiration, but because, he wrote, “They seem to be designed and certainly function to dehumanize.” What he felt was “an attraction that becomes an obsession—a like/loathe obsession that produces images suggesting imprisonment and despair.”

Later works such as Pedestrian Tunnel, 1991, echo this unease—a fluorescent-lit corridor curving away, revealing nothing beyond. “I did a lot of sketches based on experiences in airports and hospitals and tunnels underground. Then I started drawing curves intuitively... trying to describe a vortex and sense that things went on forever, never resolving, that there was nothing at the end of it, darkness nor light, that it could only return into itself.”

Even in their starkness, these institutional, engineered sites refuse neutrality—they are dense with the memory of passage. The emotional resonance of Institution deepened when Pratt realized its inspiration. While sketching “without knowing what I was doing,” he later recalled, he was preoccupied with the word “institution.” Only after completing the work did he recognize the view: a memory of​ the​ Grace ​General ​Hospital in downtown St. John’s, seen from a hospital bed—first as a teenager recovering from an appendectomy, and again decades later during his father’s final illness. “Those things are not connected except by coincidence and the power of association,” he reflected. The painting became a site of convergence, where past experiences surface unexpectedly.

For Pratt, form was never just formal—it was a way to uncover meaning. “When you arrive at an image intuitively,” he wrote in 1985, “you don’t necessarily know exactly what it means. It emerges from your subconscious like a dream…and may never fully yield.”