Archives 1989 ()

5 - 22 December 1989

A selection of original albumen photographs from the collection of the Provincial Archives of Manitoba. Photographs taken along the 49th parallel, from the Red River to the Rockies, during the surveying of the boundary between Canada and the United States (1872-47).

Background Info: In 1872-74 the American and British Government commissioned a number surveyors and photographers to survey and photograph what is now the border between the U.S. and Canada between the Great Lakes and the Rockies. Along the 49th parallel. Housed in the Manitoba archives are a set of approximately 175 photographic prints depicting much of the landscape of that area as well as prints of some of the people. The prints are albumen and are in remarkable condition ranging in size from a couple of inched square to 8 x 10.

14 November - 2 December 1989

24 October - 11 November 1989

(Weekend Warrior Series, Untitled. 1984)

I am intriged by people’s reaction to being photographed. This event I have photographed is one reminiscent of ones childhood days of dress-up and cops and robbers. My approach is direct; I determined the background, setup my camera, placed my subjects within the frame and they provided the rest. The landscape as backdrop and the juxtaposition of foreground, background and lighting of my subjects are important elements that add to the ambiguity in my photographs. My subjects were serious players in this somewhat controversial game but all agreed it was only for fun.

-Bruce Barr

12 - 30 September 1989

(Reminders, Buena Vista Park at Duboce Avenue and Buena Vista Avenue, San Francisco, California. 1979)

22 August - 9 September 1989

1 - 19 August 1989

(”Jon’s Dentist’s Colour Match” 1984)

The images in this exhibition are primarily still life’s (or animate objects rendered as still life’s). There is a common mathematics to the internal rhythms of these compositions. There is also a common quality in the subject matter. Each image isolates an object or cluster of objects near the centre of the frame and at the focus of it’s light and geometry. Each image can therefore be seen as an encapsulation of it’s subject…a simple one/two relationship… figure against ground, specimen within environment.
I have used my camera as a collecting aparatus … a tool by which I might gather evidence of a personal construct within the larger, collectively defined universe. I am directing the viewer’s attention to a single family of object which all produces similar emotional and intellectual responses. The making of each picture was triggered by a feeling I had for these objects… This “feeling” itself has an identifiable character.
There is a banality about my subject matter. These objects have little monitary value, a tacky grace,and, on the whole, are non aggressive and non threatening. They do, however, assert their presence, and I have strengthened this assertion by isolating them with my lens. Therein lies the method. Every object and event has a voice with which it engages our fascination. I have simply collected a choir of soft voices singing in minor keys… and excluded those which might be overpowering.
There are no grand themes in this symphony… no lust… no life and death struggle … no passionate obsession to make the heart race. Nevertheless there is a theme.
Our lives, for the most part, are populated by great hoards of mundane events and banal objects. yet our culture, our society and our mythologies all conspire to focus our attention on cataclysmic happenings and force our aspirations toward material goals with symbolic but hollow value. If we, as individuals, lose touch with banal reality, it should come as no surprise that our collective expressions become psychotic and out of tune with the essential value of all individual and subjective, human experience.
My reason for collecting these images were highly personal. I engaged myself and my camera in a meditative disciplines designed to turn my mental attention away from the majestic and horrific … and toward the unpretentious. Once I recognized the wealth of banality surrounding me, I could opt out of the rat race… at least for long enough to catch my breath… long enough to occupy the present moment in a sublime state of curiosity.
I have gathered them into an exhibition for reasons which have evolved from this personal motivation. A gallery is a chamber of contemplation. I leave these humble icons with the hope that their rarified essence will illustrate the ridiculousness of our collective plight.
-David Hlynsky, 1987
P.S. A note regarding the groupings of images… Occasionally when pictures talk to one another, it has been my pleasure to eavesdrop.

11 - 29 July 1989

30 May - 17 June 1989

The “Work Places” series is a projects I have been working on for several years. I am above all interested in the traces that humans leave on their surroundings. As a work place is space where humans spend a lot of time I am naturally interested in them. In the work places, workers leave their imprints and try to personalize their corner, to make it their own, or to “humanize” it.
In the course of time, in the history of a particular factory traces are added on by various “generations” of labourers; old posters stay up, dirt barely cleaned…In those work places, I felt that the workers were treated as insignificant additions to a particular decor, or as extensions to the machines and tools. This is why I chose to focus on the traces rather than on the individuals. When workers are included in the photographs they are “erased” photographically, blurred to convey my feelings of the situation. Here and there portions of bodies are appearing: a piece of a head, a hand, a pair of legs, an arm, the rest of the worker’s body being concealed by a piece of equipment as if it were absorbed or had become a permanent appendix to a special tool.
At times, the traces left are quite fugacious: vapor, smoke, slippery floors, and of course, finished products which are hastily boxed, shipped or stored away.
While I am not trying to make an inventory of work places both in Canada and Europe, the places I photographed include : clothing factories, shoe factories, food treatment plants of which a blood sausage manufacturing plant, slaughter-houses, garages, bus terminals, naval repair shops, fishing vessels, tooling and machining plants, hydraulic testing shops, pilots plants, refining plants, and the mining industries.
-Marion Bordier, December 1988

9 - 27 May 1989

(From the ‘Hope Series’, 1988)

“Hesitation: An exploration into an Aspect of Sexuality in the 1980’s” explores the angst surrounding the A.I.D.S. crisis. This body of work allows the viewer an insight into a significant aspect of male homosexuality: a time where, hand in hand, fear and sexual instinct appear in one’s thoughts.
Since the A.I.D.S. crisis makes what was previously only a romantic allegory- death by love-a reality, sexuality, and particularly homosexuality, now is informed by real and concrete fears.
Ironically in many psychological investigations eroticism has been closely related to the death instinct. Freud positions the libido as a combatant to the death instinct. George Bataille tells us that through sexual experience we achieve a “continuity of being from our discontinuous lives”, a state that we all achieve through death. While this has always been a subconscious motivation in sexual desire, when placed in the conscious through the current crisis it acts in more of a contradictory fashion. Using Bataille’s terminology, a sexual act now has the very real capability of robbing one of individuality which has been achieved through discontinuity: a capacity to create a permanent continuous state before one is quite ready for it. Instead of combating or alleviating the death instinct eroticism now seems to fuel it. As a result along with conscious sexual desire comes a strong feeling of hesitancy.
Of the three sections of HESITATION, two entitled “HOPE?”, and “EROSION”, are exhibited at Centre Eye.
“HOPE?”, consists of twenty portraits of ten males; one colour and one black and white of each person. Projected from a romantic (b&w) to a more veritable stance (colour), these portraits comment on the current state of sexuality with foreboding. The shading of the eyes blocks the “traditional” access point to the portrait and produces a strong feeling of anonymity. With this feeling of anonymity comes a frightening and ominous eroticism.An eroticism that is generated in a time when one does not know who will die next and can only question why this is generated in a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to perceive hope.
Erotica which has always been used to stimulate sexual desire has taken in new implications due to stimulate sexual desire has taken on a new implications due to the A.I.D.S. crisis. Part 2, “EROSION”, utilizes erotica to illustrate some of the contradictory thoughts that might arise when one is exposed to sexual, particularly homosexual stimulation.
This section consists of 4′ x 4′ colour images of male nudes placed against varying backdrops. The most subtle of these images uses flowers and satin to act as signifiers in the image. Flowers have frequently been used as persuasive objects in one’s amorous aspirations. If one is successful, one might find oneself wrapped up in the cliche of “satin sheets”. On a contradictory level flowers are heavily associated with funerals and at a funeral, satin most frequently lines the coffin. Other signifiers such as newspaper articles on A.I.D.S. refer to the media involvement in the issue, while a straight razor and self-inflicted wound alludes to the question, does sex equal a suicide death?
Another image utilizes monopoly money and words constructed form scrabble to comment on the role that money plays in this situation and the politic in funding a, so called, “deviant” subculture. The images in this section, will comment on the strong feelings of discrimination and persecution that are prevalent with the A.I.D.S. issue and government and religious involvement in such. These six images while having an initial seductive appeal also upon further viewing stimulate a contradictory emotional response. They offer a glimpse at the contradiction that has become constant for myself and many of my friends.
-David Williams

28 March - 15 April 1989

(Kennecott Copper Mine, Bingham Valley, Utah.1983)

Breaking Ground
In the 19th century, the temporal interests of progress and the spirituality of an untamed landscape combined in the commissioned reports of North America surveyors. Photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan and Benjamin F. Baltzly joined and recorded the exploration of the wilderness by geological and geographical teams. THey documented the edges of civilization- the mines, their own rough camps and other receding cultures- while plotting their society’s advancement along natural waterways and overland routes. Images grounded in the specific were projected into a brilliant pre-destiny.
One hundred years later, the legacy of the western landscape school was revisited in a new, less certain, age. Historians, critics and keepers of 19th century photographs retrieved and reinterpreted, sifting evidence in the arcane litigation between art and documentation. Naturalists and environmentalists fastened on those same views as tragic images of an unspoiled Eden preserved only to be surrendered to the onslaught  of man and machine. Contemporary photographers picked up where their predecessors had left off: sometimes, quite literally, by documenting changes to famous photographic sites; elsewhere by demarcating the new frontiers of suburbia and industry.
Of the rail-cuts, mines and homesteads, Burtynsky has spoken through his photographs in a rich descriptive visual language. In 1988, it may be disconcerting to be drawn still to a beauty seemingly driven by expansionism, to be seduced, in effect, by the colorization of 19th century values. What is clarified in us by Burtynsky is a timeless fascination with those values and their monuments: a fascination with photogenic corruption; a fascination with photogenic tenacity; a fascination with pure photographic expression.