"Beyond Vague Terrain: The City and the Serial Image" Surrey Art Gallery January 15 to March 15, 2012

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Collection of the Surrey Art Gallery

"Panopticon: 103 Views of the Scotia Bank Tower" (detail)

Bill Jeffries, "Panopticon: 103 Views of the Scotia Bank Tower" (detail), 1978-79, 11” by 14” Silver gelatin emulsion on paper,

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Courtesy of the artist and Elliott Louis Gallery

"Construction Sites Phase II: Phoenix Complex"

Helma Sawatzky, "Construction Sites Phase II: Phoenix Complex", 2009-2011, Lightjet print mounted on aluminum dibond,

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Image courtesy of the artist

"Millennium Line"

Khan Lee, "Millennium Line" (detail), 2011, Backlit photographic transparency

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Collection of the Surrey Art Gallery

"Panopticon: 97 Views of the Scotia Bank Tower" (detail)

Bill Jeffries, "Panopticon: 97 Views of the Scotia Bank Tower" (detail), 1978-79, 11” by 14”, Silver gelatin emulsion on paper

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Collection of the Surrey Art Gallery

"Panopticon: 103 Views of the Scotia Bank Tower" (detail)

Bill Jeffries, "Panopticon: 103 Views of the Scotia Bank Tower" (detail), 1978-79, 11” by 14” Silver gelatin emulsion on paper,

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"Beyond Vague Terrain: The City and the Serial Image"

Surrey Art Gallery

January 15 to March 15, 2012

By Michael Harris

The city of Surrey, no longer a cross-eyed suburb next to Vancouver’s “real” urbanity, is engaged in a serious course of citymaking. It is spending nearly three billion dollars on a series of projects (a new city hall, central library and plaza) all within a stone’s throw of each other.   For the first time, Surrey’s planners and politicians have built themselves the suggestion of a true city centre. Just in time, the Surrey Art Gallery’s curator, Jordan Strom, has produced a bellicose, intelligent show that interrogates the notion of having a city centre at all.

Beyond Vague Terrain includes work by photoconceptual kingpins Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace (it would hardly begin its conversation without them) but the most captivating moments in Strom’s show arise from other sources.

For starters, Roy Kiyooka’s black-and-white “Powell Street Promenade” (1978-80) makes a major downtown street look like a surreal wasteland; his promenade takes place at a “no-place” that is about as sexy as grandma’s underwear. Then we have Chris Gergley’s wonderful “Vancouver Apartments” series (2005). These photographs of apartment foyers show differently decked cubes of over-lit space that are weirdly akin, with faux glamour names like “Cedar Villa” emblazoned in gold lettering across glass doors, never-in-style carpets and tired potted plants. As in Kiyooka’s street scene, Gergley finds banal moments quite close to the so-called “heart” of Vancouver (his apartments, while dispirited, are stubbornly urban too). We begin to recognize a disinterest in anything monumental or iconic. Indeed, many of the images in Beyond Vague Terrain are serial and emphatically so.

Perhaps the most strident example of the refusal to localize is Khan Lee’s trippy piece “Millennium Line” (2011), which circles an entire room with a 109-foot long backlit ribbon of photographic transparency, displaying hundreds of stitched-together video images taken from the window of a Skytrain as it shuttles between suburban stations. Lee’s piece replicates that woozy, forehead-against-window sense of a whizzing-by landscape. We barely distinguish one station from the next and, in the inaccessible patches of urbanity beyond, we glimpse snatches of highway, gas stations and parking lots. By crystallizing such a time-lapsed experience into a single visual moment, Lee gives us access not to just another spree of suburban visual blah, but real insight into the otherwise-invisible system that creates and underlines that “blah.” Lee’s Skytrain trip in the suburbs is carefully spliced together, to make comprehensible a larger rhythm that would otherwise be lost.

On opening night, I joined the crowd being drawn in by the intelligence and wry humour of Bill Jeffries’ “Panopticon: 103 Views of the Scotia Bank Tower” (1978/79). Jeffries’ silver gelatin prints document the intense presence of that 450-foot tower at a time when it dominated Vancouver's skyline. The Scotia logo, a glowing red eye, peers outward and is glimpsed from 103 different vantage points at the perimeter of the city. Jeffries appears to reference Foucault’s notion of the Panopticon - the all-seeing prison tower. In Foucault’s 1975 book, Discipline and Punish, he describes how no one can see the prison guard, only the tower; looming architecture becomes its own authority. Jeffries’ bank tower images speak to a similarly unquestioned authority. Could a traditional, centralized cityscape be a kind of visual despotism?

Beyond Vague Terrain is more than a return to the “defeatured” suburban landscapes celebrated in earlier decades; it deconstructs that centre-perimeter dichotomy. Perhaps, as our car-culture becomes increasingly problematic and our cities stumble toward some brave new organization, we’ll discover “the centre cannot hold” after all.