Jennifer Crane: Becoming

Jennifer Crane
Becoming
PAVED Arts, Saskatoon
May 25 - June 23, 2007


Entering the space at PAVED Arts, you might have to go through a white lattice archway. You wouldn’t be wrong to assume this space is about marking a transition, but it’s far more complicated than that--this is a long one, folks, so please bear with me. There is room, with this show, to discuss photographic philosophy as it relates to the idea of the document, and what makes art photography different, by any measure, from commercial or documentary photography. But there are more pressing issues at work here, which hover unresolved.

To the left of the entrance are 10 photographs, and across from them are 5 larger variations. The smaller works depict girls--16 or 17 years old--in casual clothing. They are smiling, posing slightly and awkwardly, and standing in front of lockers. “SHAINA,” we are told, is the name of one of them, and "SARAH" is another; we are told the names of the others as well, although the labels--in all capital letters and solid black font, organized outside of the images--seem to resemble names less than they do catalogue labels or model numbers. The photographs themselves are cropped tight to the girls heads, giving them only a small amount of visual breathing space in front of the institutionality of their lockers--their calves and feet are severed by the border of the picture. Next to these is a pair of video monitors which show the same girls in a series of camera-dress sequences, also in front of the lockers.

The larger photographs show the same girls in prom dresses. These images are even more uncanny than their smaller, casual counterparts, as the girls possess the immediate outward appearance of being dressed up; upon closer inspection, however, we see that they are all wearing the same makeup and hair as in their pseudo-candid portraits. One girl grimaces with her tongue sticking out. Therefore they have put on the clothing but still cannot manage to embody the commercial elegance they seem to be after. In these larger versions, their heads are also given more room and nothing of theirs is severed by the borders of the image, although they remain flanked by the institutional structure of the lockers.

This exhibition itself has an institutional layout typical of gallery spaces and the exhibitionary order, and of the lockers the girls inhabit--images are arranged according to a grid system of rows and columns. There are a couple of group photographs to the sides of the other images (and another in front of the aforementioned lattice gate), each of which depicts a set of three of the girls posing together. In these cases, the girls are posed in a classroom, in front of a board containing posters, drawings, letters, etc., all arranged more according to size and shape than any obvious external order.

Looking at the images in the classroom scenes, we realize that the girls pictured understand visual media less hierarchically than an artist or gallerist might, arranging images and data with more emphasis on where that data fits, rather than establishing a system of regulation to which the images and their placement conform. This raised, for me, issues of control in a photographer-subject hierarchy; while the girls may have been able to "choose" their clothing (from a limited array of available dresses) and poses, they presumably did not choose their location (as it is uniform). Furthermore, the photographer retains control of the camera position, framing/composition and fundamentally the editing of a sequence of shots down to a single proof, thereby reclaiming control over her subjects. Finally, they are displayed the way the photographer, in conjunction with exhibitionary norms, chooses to display them.

Viewers may therefore be tempted to read the artist’s process as the imposition of conformity upon something innately organic, or that an otherwise gradual process--the preparation for the “coming out” that is graduation, normally lengthy--has been rushed for the sake of efficiency. Reading the exhibition text we realize that the girls pictured are not graduating until next year, and are therefore willing participants in this process of structured visual precociousness--in what I can only assume are ways they don’t or can’t fully understand yet.

In addition to the layout, I couldn’t help but notice that these images depict a fairly uniform demographic--white, thin girls who are roughly of the age of consent. Furthermore, gleaning from the exhibition text that these girls attend Holy Cross High School, one wonders about the decision to exhibit this work in Riversdale. Walking through the space created by the installation, I couldn’t help but be aware that it is incongruous with the majority of institutional educational experience in its surrounding urban environs. This is, after all, an area of Saskatoon where under a third of the residents are listed as having completed high school--a number which is, incidentally, decreasing--and where, for some, institutional education is synonymous with the catastrophic and genocidal Residential School system.

Even though prom culture may be "enduring," it is by no means universal.



The walls not populated with photographs of the young women carry a set of 4 photographs of fallen dresses. The dresses appear to be of the type used in the other photographs, although I don’t recall noticing any direct correlation between them. The fallen dresses are shot from above, and most radiate around their central apertures. Understanding the sexual nature of prom culture and the form of coming-of-age that is perhaps the most anxiety-laden for adolescents, I cannot help but see the more flesh-coloured of these dresses as hymenal orifices; the others are flower-like, although even they are subsequently unable to avert the sexual implications of that metaphor. Furthermore, because the dresses are earthbound and uninhabited, they take on the character of discarded shells. While this may also reference transition, it also implies nudity and vulnerability. The images themselves appear to have been shot on a grey (concrete?) background and with a flash only slightly to the side of the camera--the effect this produces is the low contrast and washing out that resembles the snapshot. These images, like their portraiture counterparts, are awkward; lacking the chiaroscuro or the asymmetry that would secure their place as formally beautiful art photography, they have a grittiness which only serves to underscore the clandestine and unsettling nature of their context and content.

In the end, I found this exhibition to be confusing, disturbing, and unresolved. In attending Jennifer Crane’s artist talk, it became clear that others had also been knocked off-balance by the work presented. This is especially troubling in that the artist seems to possess a sincere concern and an investment in the nature of prom culture and working with young women. However, while this is apparent in her personality, it is muddied in the artwork. Some of it may stem from the fact that there seems to be a lack of a coherent thesis or articulated reason for making the work, while another factor may be the litany of political hotbuttons that are being bumped into (such as underaged sex; racial, financial and stylistic inequities; institutionality and control, etc.). As such, we are left with some fairly disturbing images, some semi-opaque processes, and some assumptions about the rhetoric of transition and development which, when examined, suggest processes of institutionalization, alienation and violation.

--Lee Henderson

Handheld Landscape at AKA Gallery

Handheld Landscape
Toni Hafkenscheid and Tim Van Wijk
March 30 to May 5, 2007 - AKA Gallery, Saskatoon


I first saw Toni Hafkenscheid’s photographs at the Aperture Foundation in New York. I suppose my reaction to them was similar to that of most people--an assumption that the photographs were of scale miniatures, followed by the realization that his subjects are actual landscapes (as actual as any photographed subject is), manipulated visually.

Hafkenscheid’s work, featured at AKA Gallery alongside Tim Van Wijk’s mechanical Landscape Generator, is less a practice of photography of or about something external than it is about photography itself. As viewers, we go through the aforementioned stages of assumption and realization a number of times. While looking at these photos, I found myself wondering why we first read his subjects as miniatures; his distortions are not the product of narrow depth-of-field, but rather the product of a particular type of lens (this is why there is a band of focused image through the middle of each piece, with blurriness radiating from it regardless of how close to or far from the camera a given object in the frame would have been).

Compounding the photography-as-subject tendency in these works is the fact that viewers, observed during my time in the space, were discussing the success of a given photo relative to another based on formal qualities and the quality of the illusion generated by Hafkenscheid’s process. That is, if there arose a claim about which of the images was “better” than another, it was supported by evidence including the difference in blurriness between the middle and the side of the photograph, or of the discernability of the people pictured, or of the way the saturation of the image made the objects look plastic. In other words, typical photo-aesthetic analysis--concerning light sources, composition, dispersion and proportion of colours, etc.--was not applied to these photographs by viewers. I suspect this is not due to a lack of knowledge (AKA shares space, and audience, with PAVED Arts, and both institutions have a photo-savvy core audience) but is instead a result of the clear intentionality of Hafkenscheid’s work; because he has not entirely fooled us, we are interested in discussing how he was able to come so close.

Hafkenscheid has given these works what seem to be deliberately inane titles (Motel, for instance, or Train Trestle--both of which are pictured here), and I suspect this is to further the focus of these works as a technical one rather than one based on content or subject matter. I suspect the artist could continue to produce these images indefinitely, although I’m less sure of whether that would be a good idea or not--such photographs would likely be as successful as their earlier iterations, but would also not contribute anything new to the dialogue.




Tim Van Wijk’s Landscape Generator, on the other hand, is designed and built to be functionally transparent. The work is a large machine composed of a series of axles, wheels and cogs made of painted wood; it has a hand crank protruding from its back and as a viewer turns the crank the gears are set in motion. These gears in turn cause circular sections of landscape--visible from the front of the machine--to rotate at different speeds, creating a pseudo-illusion of passing in front of things at various distances from one’s eyes. This is assuming, of course, that one has a friend willing to crank the machine for him or her. But the large trees in front move more quickly than the smaller trees in back, and faster still than the mountains behind those; this is all viewed in motion through a white sheet in a gold frame with a windshield-wiper arc-shape cut out of it.

I use the term pseudo-illusion because there is no attempt made by Van Wijk to deceive, even briefly, his viewers. This machine is theatrical in a way that Hafkenscheid’s photographs are not--it requires physical interaction and produces a certain awkward illusion of depth, but it does so in a way that introduces one to the means of illusion before the illusion itself can occur. We are asked, therefore, to suspend disbelief from our first encounter with the work, and this is fortunate. Otherwise, we may wonder why a single tire could fit around several trees, or why we seem to be looking out the front windshield of a vehicle when the landscape is moving sideways.




As for the combination of these works, to emphasize landscape seems at first to be a grasping at a connection between two very different practices which both happen to image landscapes; I don’t believe that any of this work is really about landscape as content. Rather, the two practices employ the imagery of landscape to interrogate, from opposing approaches, the nature of illusion and our willingness to participate in the acceptance--or generation, or perpetuation--of the illusions that surround us, whether those are environmental, social, utilitarian, or purely visual. However the decision in both cases to explore illusion while imaging landscape suggests--potentially--a cultural trend that is responding to the possibility of ecological disaster. "One day," the thesis could go, "all landscape will be illusory."