The Accidental Curator
Last weekend I went to Vancouver, BC, ate a lot of good food, and was in two car accidents. I'm fine, thanks for asking.
I had compiled a list of galleries and art spaces that friends and colleagues thought worth checking out. Through a haphazard itinerary, I visited a few of them and saw in person work by a couple of artists I had only up to now read about, and some I had never heard of at all. And, funny thing, it was as if the art galleries of Vancouver had conspired to set up a thoughtful little accidental exhibition of works about architecture.
All right, that's overstating it. But at Catriona Jeffries, there is a series of black-and-white photographs by Damian Moppett--one of a generation of artists that's been said to have challenged the Vancouver School, which includes such formidable artists as Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, Ian Wallace, and Rodney Graham--of modernist-style architectural maquettes made of cardboard and other homely materials, all photographed in what appears to be the artist's studio. A row of empty bleach bottles, a desk with books piled up, a corrugated cardboard background with a long rip through it--these are the somewhat degraded backgrounds for monuments to the cleanest and most severe forms of architecture (even if largely or possibly completely imaginary). The photographs are both playful and cerebral; the paradox of architecture's implied foreverness (although all buildings, it's been said, are future ruins) set against a disposable, conceptual landscape.
Right across the gallery is a large canvas by Ian Wallace--a photograph of Times Square at Seventh Avenue--with long narrow panels of paint on either side; a miracle of fragmentation with reflected images broken up over rows of windows, multipaneled billboards, those broken-up reflections re-reflected in car windows, and all of this gently emphasized by the colored panels, the stripes of a crosswalk, the stripes of the shirt of a man crossing the crosswalk. But all so splendidly integrated that the chaos becomes a pleasure.
Where Moppett and Wallace are obviously partial to the chaos, even as they integrate it into their work, Eric Glavin (at State Gallery) turns contemporary architecture into slick, impenetrable c-prints with almost every human impulse leeched out of them. You might think from that description that I didn't like his work, but I did. There is an image--photographed, scanned, and manipulated, as far as I can tell--that could have been one of those ugly Belltown condos, here reduced to a kind of rationalist map and therefore given a kind of dignity. (It occurs to me that Billy Howard, with his penchant for abstraction that verges on the architectural would have loved my little self-curated show.)
As we turned to leave the gallery, my husband pointed out a window overlooking one of those ugly condominiums, the view perfectly framed and flattened, like a Glavin print.
