Art Gallery of Windsor

Racing Queens, Mosport International Raceway, near Bowmanville, Ontario, 1983

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Capture - recent Canadian photography
Nickle Arts Museum
Friday, February 15 - Friday, May 9

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Nickle Arts Museum

At first glance, Passing Through, the large touring exhibition of photographs by Canadian conceptual artist Iain Baxter&, appears to be quite reserved. Instead, the show develops into an engaging survey of the artist’s fascination with documenting cars, mirrors, road trips, natural and industrial spaces and Canadiana galore through several decades of his career.

Enter the idyllic and yet hokey CanCon scene, Canada Day BBQ, North Vancouver, British Columbia, 1979, that depicts a neighbourhood party with a cluster of kids playing tetherball in the centre of the shot. There’s a certain magic and optimism in his vision of our country, with images of people and landscapes that stretch from the West Coast all through Alberta, the Prairies and as far as Toronto.

Aside from a few problematic text panels, the pacing through the exhibition’s themes delivers many surprises, insights and moments for contemplation. Baxter&’s large illuminated light boxes are truly magnetic, and a subtle humour can be found in his depictions of signage and social gatherings.

Baxter& has an eye for jokes embedded in commercial signage. A building in a sun-bleached shipping yard is emblazoned with the name “Erection Shop” in big block letters, and a little dive restaurant advertises the “obscene brownie sundae” as an awkward kid in sport shorts walks by. Sign, Highway 17, New Sudbury, Ontario is simply a picture of an empty highway sign taken from a car. Given his interest in corporate and civic cultures, and the number of signs he has documented, this seems to be the best conceptual joke of all. There is no advertisement — only the supporting structure that’s usually hidden behind the sign, like the backstage of a theatre set being exposed.

Like Canada Day BBQ, his Kitsilano Garden Party features a circular grouping of people in hippy outfits that seem just as funny and dated as all those 1970s wood-panelled station wagons, campers and pickup trucks parked around a gently sloping hill in his shots of the Mosport International Raceway in Ontario. Racing Queens, Mosport International Raceway, near Bowmanville, Ontario, captures a simple moment of chance, and we see multiple views of the scene unfold through Baxter&’s hand-held mirror — a technique he uses many times throughout the show to isolate the subject and add subjective, narrative potential. Immediately in its reflection are two beauty queens in crazy red spandex outfits with feathered hair posing for this photo opportunity. Behind his mirror is a red-shirted mechanic who’s oblivious to the scene, and an old fellow who is caught off guard by a gust of wind while his camera strap is blown in a perfect loop.

Ephemeral, disappeared and little seen places are made visible in Baxter&’s photographs of motel rooms, back-alley piles of garbage and a rural shack where tarpaulin, old pots and a requisite tree-stump-used-as-furniture populate the dilapidated space. He also lends a sharp eye to the march of progress in his documentation of Vancouver in the ’70s, timely again as criticisms around the 2010 Olympic bid are heating up.

Passing Through is complemented by CAPTURE: Contemporary Canadian Photography, from the collection in The Nickle’s back gallery. Phil Begerson’s cheeky photos share Baxter&’s interest in signs and rural kitsch, and they’re a good lead for a show that aims to chart Canadian photographic history through the lens of Baxter&. The intense saturation of his Chromogenic prints revives a similar nostalgia for the era in which popular interest in photography exploded in the ’60s and ’70s.

The real highlights of CAPTURE are series by Diana Thorneycroft and Evergon. Both practice a highly staged form of photography that combines portraiture with theatrical narratives. Thorneycroft’s photographs are a dramatic departure from Passing Through, but her elaborately constructed scenes still involve common themes of human interaction within the natural environment. She depicts nude or wrapped figures in various forms of medical torture or, perhaps more pleasurably, bondage. Many of her works have become the subject of widespread national controversy, so seeing them in person is a treat. In the context of The Nickel’s small survey on Canadian photography, curator Christine Sowiak places Thorneycroft within the canon (where they should be), and reopens the work to interpretations of how nature, eroticism, bondage and suffering relate to the Canadian imagination.

Evergon’s triptych, The Rose, also veers from straight documentation toward more illicit pleasures. Two men in lush silk turbans are pictured on either side, and the central photograph concentrates on their exchange of a deep red rose, as one presents it to the other’s reaching hand. Evergon eroticizes these handsome men under a veil of dramatic Orientalism, as their coy looks and delicate hand gestures trump the authenticity of their costumes.

Creating collection shows is a tough job, because the temptation to show works that aren’t particularly good can be high. Essentially, the Iain Baxter& works that are trotted out for CAPTURE aren’t the strongest foundation for this exhibition. His series of Polaroid pictures of cut-up bananas are funny and show another minor development in his use of photography. Room with two balls also employs photographs stuck on a painted surface, but compared with the beauties in the Nickle’s main space, it’s a reminder that not everything the famed photo-conceptualist has produced is a winner.