SIMULACRA : ARCA LUMIS

Rose Bouthillier’s mayor series was the surprise hit of the Whatcom Photography Biennial in Bellingham a few weeks ago, generating a small buzz at the two-hour panel Q and A. Her tender age belies a sophisticated humor and stylistic panache, generally accrued by photographers more advanced in years and experience. With this particular series, Bouthillier has introduced the viewer to a disparate group of small-town leaders spread out across Canada and Washington state, yet aesthetically manages to compile a family reunion with the muted blue/green/brown color palettes, Spartan arrangements, and symbolic gestures. This is no small feat, considering that the subjects chose their own attire, surroundings, and poses; how to explain, then, that with the exception of Irena Theissen, all of the other mayors decided to pose in or around plants or other simulacra of the great outdoors, such as the mountain scene hanging above the head of Mark Asmundson or the shellacked cross-section of a log situated above Gordon Brookfield (who is inexplicably wearing tennis shoes)? Rolly Magee is so connected to a giant fern in the corner that it becomes a de facto hairpiece, which begs the question: did Bouthillier slyly recommend he sink back into the corner further and further, until the poor man seemed harried by his office decorations? And was Connie Butcher aware of the small tree tickling her right shoulder? There is a hint of kitsch, perhaps accentuated by artificial lighting and somewhat anachronistic dress, but there is also a commonality of form, lighting, and composition expressed in a static formalism, as if Stanley Kubrick had been put in charge of an Olan Mills shoot for an afternoon. Bouthillier has made a profound aesthetic out of ordinariness in these purposely prosaic portraits; yet they are ultimately a billet doux to the small towns of North America.

From her artist statement:

The act of being photographed is inherently one of being recognized, of receiving recognition. Mayors arose out of my interest in this affirming nature of portraiture and the politics of photography, an exploration of regionality, mild celebrity, and self-identification. Politicians in small towns are public figures on a miniature scale, and their reasons for participating in this project are linked to their civic responsibilities. The discrepancy between my reasons and theirs, mixed with their own idiosyncratic degrees of self-consciousness and self-importance, illustrate what Diane Arbus described as “the gap between intention and effect”. The negotiation between presenting themselves as “the mayor of…” and presenting their physical selves comes through in a range of expressions, from awkwardness to confidence, and sometimes grace.

I am interested in the pseudo-anthropological potential of these images - a selection of people based on a qualifier that then becomes a study of class, gender, age and race. The visual details of the photographs, from the style of dress to the conditions and use of the town office, are all related to the economics, development, and culture of the towns they represent.

GORDON BROOKFIELD, NEW DENVER

ROLLY MAGEE, BLACK DIAMOND

MARK ASMUNDSON, BELLINGHAM

CONNIE BUTCHER, REDWATER

IRENA THEISSEN, NEW NORWAY

MARTIN CARRIERE, WABAMUN LAKE

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Whether Tim Roda’s art could be construed as photography, theater, installation, sculpture, film, or even poetry, he is first and foremost a storyteller. The antecedents of these stories are personal memories covered by the patina of “old” Europe, universally expressed through his family. Tim echoes the maxim that photography is “time fixed on paper,” but he is specifically interested in the business of printing the legend, casting himself as Caravaggio on the lam or Lao Tzu improvising the heavens on a horse’s derriere at the city gates. There is a primal urgency to his tall tales, like a family secret brimming at the edge of a child’s lips, and he cleverly utilizes his son, Ethan, to convey it. His wife, Allison, dons the mask of sympathetic mediator, the stand-in for Demeter and Hestia (with a nod to Artemis) who blunts the severity of each sacred rite by keeping a watchful eye on the proceedings.

As my father once observed about his own rite of passage, “affection between men has always been circumscribed by pain…here, in the balance between love and brutality, lies the origin of sport, the first act of civilization.” Tim does not sentimentalize this tension or reduce it to the stoic father who only expresses his love obliquely through sweet teachings. Instead, he reveals the primitive conflict in all of us through his unique chiaruscuro scrims, which morph between portraits of the noble savage and the domestic captive. It’s fair to say he errs on the side of the cave-dweller or shaman where he and his son are concerned; however, civilization interposes the moment Allison enters the scene. Ethan’s complex role is that of the cipher, the helpmeet, and trickster: he is a mirror of the father’s romance, the one who must bear witness; he is a squire attending his father as he antagonizes threshold guardians; and most importantly, he is a playful reminder that these reenactments are ultimately more about spending time together than limning the contours of his father’s past and present.

Like his forbears, Tim is the salt of the earth, accustomed to hard work and getting his hands dirty. He’s also proud to let his craftsmanship speak for itself, rather than construct elaborate orthodoxies to justify (or codify) his intuition for the sake of less fearless folk. There is a casual bluntness to his aesthetic, a rustic paean to ancestor worship (where the initiate gives fealty to disembodied spirits, even as they are simultaneously exorcised). It’s a discomfiting language, one spoken with his malleable body, not unlike Buster Keaton trapped in Torquemada’s lair. His pratfalls are dangerous but deliberate, which means he is less a victim than the embodiment of a willful provocateur (with the transfigured spirit and regenerated body of Osiris/Prometheus/Dionysus/Christ/St. Bartholomew).

As if in a race against time, Tim builds these forbidding worlds and breaks them down in the same day, punctuating the ritual with a family dinner. His large-scale photographs are a testament to this process, like oversized movie stills, melding the unconscious intimacy of a home movie with the texture of a Goya etching. (sidebar: you must see these pictures live, at their true size…seeing them exclusively on the web or in magazines would be the equivalent of watching “Lawrence of Arabia” on an iPod). Tim channels the magic realism and duende of a gypsy troubadour, with one foot planted firmly in Freudian soil, the other wildly kicking up the detritus of the Jungian spirit world (which manifests in his unblemished printing method, replete with rough borders, developer stains, and mottled artifacts).

A gulf between father and son is mediated by the mother, in the role of Demeter. The son rehearses Persephone’s future plea in the burning mirror, illumined by his mother’s rightward gaze, his features blanched by a secret knowledge. The father encroaches on the left in the guise of a director, reminding them of the bargain: the son must bear witness, the wife, abide.

The holy family keeps its own counsel. A tacit agreement predetermines their story: the father as Hades lurks off stage, whispering his child’s lines. In turn, Ethan’s spirit leaps to him, far from the mother’s succoring heart (the understudy now donning his father’s mask).

A tilted mirror has maintained the family myth. The son, like Isaac in repose (occluded by his father’s gleaming blade), reproves the absent mother for his fate. A silver mask bisects the pensive child, his father’s countenance angling to meet him, the surface neither fractured nor annealed.

The play is from antiquity: Cronus enthralled, Uranus unaware of the future irony. The understudy sharpens his focus, the master contrives a future resurrection.

Ganymede bears a reliquary before the angry host: the ghost limb of Osiris, once consigned to water, now nourishes the lamb (even as the shepherd reproaches them, the Virgin Mary in abeyance).

Dionysus reclines for the winter, his body withering on the vine.

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THE STILLNESS OF MOTION:

The most transcendent photograph in this series is “Night Returning,” which channels Arnold Böcklin’s “The Isle of the Dead,” albeit in more placid tones. This moment conjures the image of a celestial portal with its stark, unremitting symmetry, melding the austerity of Valhalla with the etherea of Brahman, and whose pure abstraction could lead one to interject a myriad narratives: Hasegawa Tohaku’s screen painting set to Sibelius’ “Finlandia,” or perhaps Stanley Kubrick’s Stargate sequence from “2001″ imagined as a sfumato sketch by Seurat. Fundamentally, its lack of information is the very thing that precipitates such fancies. Holden takes this a step further with “Sunyata: Glacier” and “Sunyata: Ocean,” two aptly-named minimalist photographs. From Wikipedia:

Śūnyatā (Sanskrit noun from the adj. sūnya - ‘void’ ), Suññatā (Pāli; adj. suñña), stong pa nyid (Tibetan), Kuu, 空 (Japanese) qoɣusun (Mongolian) meaning “Emptiness” or “Voidness”, is a characteristic of empirical phenomena arising from the fact (as observed and taught by the Buddha) that the impermanent nature of form means that nothing possesses essential, enduring identity (see anattā). In the Buddha’s spiritual teaching, insight into the emptiness of phenomena (Pali: suññatānupassanā) is an aspect of the cultivation of insight (vipassanā-bhāvanā) that leads to wisdom and inner peace. The importance of this insight is especially emphasised in Mahayana Buddhism.

In “Mont-Francais” we are confronted with the mysterious floating figure, which comically reduces the mountain to a mere sand dune because of the lack of depth cues, much like the isomorphic perspective of an Oriental landscape. Because of her allusions to Mahayana Buddhism, I’m tempted to view my own fancies with suspicion: does she intend to capture the figure as a pure, ontic being, or does it represent an idea of being-ness? A better question might be: does Holden retroactively infer this Zen detachment with her titles, or does she frame all of her shots with Bhudda-nature in mind? Looking at this picture through a Campbellian lens, the silhouette appears anchored to the plane with a hair-thin umbilical cord, juxtaposing the fragile notion of the unborn child with that of the universal cosmonaut; the neonate exists in its vacuum like a thoughtless ether or a dissembled soul after Pari Nirvana, while the adult traveler willfully and deliberately ventures into the unknown (the threshold of adventure), risking a physical body (apotheosis) for the sake of attaining a similar selflessness (sacred elixer). If the hero archetype seems a bit of a stretch, consider the following from Holden’s online biography:

Growing up on a sailboat on the coast of British Columbia and harvesting wild rice on isolated lakes of Manitoba for the first fourteen years of her life, Roberta developed a love of remote and rugged environments, solitude and open spaces. From these early experiences grew an insatiable curiosity to explore and the invaluable skills of self-reliance that laid the groundwork for her later mountaineering and single-handed offshore sailing projects. It seems just as natural that these inspirations would fuel her passion for photography and, that photography in turn would allow Roberta to continue her explorations from a new perspective…Roberta currently volunteers as a search and rescuer with the Lions Bay Mountain Rescue Team north of Vancouver.

Holden embodies the artist-as-hero by documenting her flirtations with the abyss. This leads us to imagine more than just the “beingness” of the shot, but also her well-being while taking it (see “Southern Ocean I, II, and III,” which marry the savagery of Winslow Homer with the shimmering veneer of Mapplethorpe).

WORDS FOR SNOW:
There’s a sense of hurriedness in this second group of landscapes, a suggestion that to hold still with a camera for too long in Antarctic Canada is to invite frostbite. The dangers appear manifold: Holden shoots with a stunned curiosity, as if she happened upon a Yeti or is fleeing itinerant prospectors and bloodhounds. There’s even a touch of Robert Capa at Omaha Beach in her most surreal picture, “Running Up the Road.” Is the figure atop the knoll an enemy? A family member? A totemic spirit or cairn? Holden’s images are gravid with meaning, yet seemingly bereft of narrative at the same time, as if Franz Kline had lightly gessoed over Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Her companion piece to this photo is “Night Walk,” which also eschews the stoic clarity one associates with northern climes; in its stead, another floating, ominous silhouette. Holden, whether by design or unconscious habit, gives her more frightening pictures precious titles, perhaps to minimize the visceral dread. Take, for instance, “Inviting House in a Blizzard.” My first inclination: there is nothing in the least bit inviting about this house, which resembles a blast furnace more so than a warm hearth. It readily conjures the superheated tombs of the Sixth Circle in Dante’s Inferno or a white-hot smelting pot from a Chicago steel mill, circa 1930 (in short, more like Vulcan’s forge than grandmother’s winter cottage). Whether we are looking at the noirish glowering headlights of “Dark Street” or the post-apocalyptic fearscapes of “Tundra, “Blizzard at Night,” “Ulukhaktok,” and “Powerlines,” it is clear that there is no safe haven in Holden’s Judecca; not even the shivering “Church,” the archetypal sanctuary of sanctuaries, is inured to the cold.

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