Boring Yellowknife

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Bob Wilson, “YK Centre 18,” 2023-2024, 12" x 18" (photo courtesy of the artist)

Northerners are divided on Bob Wilson’s art. Some are intrigued by his emotionally flat, deadpan images, and by his 30 years — and counting — of photographing "the real" Yellowknife — one that doesn’t have anything stereotypically or romantically northern about it. 

Others though, feel his photos are exceedingly dull. One irritated gallery visitor once asked me, “Why would this artist waste his time, and ours, photographing such boring stuff?” 

“Because Bob’s ‘eye’ makes boring things exquisitely so,” I offered. These divided reactions are mirrored by reactions to the city itself. There are two kinds of Yellowknifers, after all — those who think this city of 20,000 is ugly, and those who stubbornly believe in its charm. YK Centred, Wilson’s solo exhibition of 45 photographs, opens Dec. 2, at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre. It focuses the aesthetic debate on Yellowknife Centre, our beleaguered downtown. It is sure to impress some viewers and annoy others. 

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Bob Wilson “YK Centre 30,” 2023-2024, 12" x 18" (photo courtesy of the artist)

To my mind, Wilson has been an unsung hero of contemporary Canadian photography for decades.  Unsung, only because he lives here — in the boonies of the art world, and because he hasn’t pursued much attention. His work though, certainly has a place in current national conversations. Montreal-based Geoffrey James just released a book of photographs that according to his publisher, examines “the Canadian unconscious and the Not-So-True North.” Noted photographer Phil Bergerson — who was Wilson’s professor at Ryerson (now Toronto Metropolitan University) in the mid 1970s — also has a forthcoming book which documents more than 1,700 Canadian cities and towns. If I had the required resources and clout, I would curate a three-person show, with Wilson, Bergerson and James: the new, Canadian iteration of America’s late 1960’s ‘New Topographic’ movement.

Though Wilson’s exhibition might look like straight-up documentary photography at first glance, it is far from it. Astute viewers will feel something subtly unnerving in his depictions of YK Centre. There is a "something else" going on in his portraits of what passes for northern architecture, in his depictions of our various corrugated metal rectangles. There’s something odd, too, about his portraits of what passes for character homes. In the heart of Yellowknife, there are several streets of unkempt wartime houses once built for the families of miners. 

The something unnerving is this: Wilson’s photographs are tweaked and manipulated just enough to describe a place that doesn’t quite exist. His YK Centre is an almost-pretend city, one where the sky is always blue and one that is always peaceful, without the noisome drama of people and traffic. In Wilson’s city, all corners and angles are perfectly square. Several cloud formations behind disparate buildings are the exact same. Wait a second, I found myself asking. Do Yellowknife skies really repeat themselves? Wilson’s stagecraft is so crisp, it’s hard not to believe this. Maybe Yellowknife skies scroll by on a reel? Maybe, as Wilson’s work suggests, our town is just a grittier Truman Show, a bright and grimy trompe l’oeil?

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Bob Wilson, “YK Centre 28,” 2023-2024, 12" x 18" (photo courtesy of the artist)

Wilson is Yellowknife’s best, albeit only, street photographer. He’s a bit of a flaneur, a term popularized in 19^th century France to mean someone who wanders around cities for the sole purpose of paying attention, especially to the conditions of modernity. Aimless walking, psychogeographers say, is an act of insurgency. When photographing Yellowknife, Wilson waits for hard sunlight. This is necessary, he says, for the detail it reveals. For north-facing buildings, he must get up very early. He shoots mostly on Sundays, when no one is racing to and fro, when downtown streets are silent. Sometimes, he says, the sky needs replacing. When we look up at buildings, they naturally taper. So in the editing process, he de-keystones them. He acknowledges his photos can be mildly disconcerting. “We just don’t see cities like that,” he says, “with such straightness and emptiness.” Viewed another way, Wilson’s photos describe how the city might have looked in the aftermath of last summer’s wildfire evacuation — a stage prop in an empty theatre, drained of its life.

Sometimes art helps us slip from blindness into seeing. Sometimes art’s little trickeries, little guises, can enable gestalt shifts. Poetry, said someone, famously, makes the familiar strange. Through photography, argued Susan Sontag, we become tourists of our own reality. Wilson’s photos let us see the form hiding behind the function. He shows us how the crappy blue siding of the local newspaper’s headquarters is really a dreamy, near-symmetrical, minimalist abstraction. Wilson’s photo of a wide, blank, grey-bricked wall in a nondescript parking lot is so utterly boring, so utterly banal, that it becomes entirely riveting. How did Wilson create such starkly oxymoronic visions? And why do they feel so purely imperfect, so ideally un-ideal? 

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Bob Wilson, “YK Centre 21,” 2023-2024, 12" x 18" (photo courtesy of the artist)

Yellowknife is more or less a mix of cheaply made prefab trailer homes and industrial warehouses. Parcels of land are haphazardly blasted from the rock. No one really knows (or cares) what their property is zoned for. They just build what they want. Our satellite dishes, electrical boxes, and broken chain-link fences just hang out there in the northern wind. They aren’t hidden behind mature trees or designer shrubs. It often feels like Yellowknife is naked, while other cities are well dressed. But our nakedness is amusing in that awkward, cringey way. And grit, as a texture, is a more honest reflection of our existential state. Despite its editorial manipulations, Wilson’s work feels tethered to the real. It offers a kind of consolation for those of us who prefer living in places devoid of pretty veneers. I don’t read critique in Wilson’s work, though. He is not for or against the boring ugliness of Yellowknife. Rather, the photos in YK Centred seem to say “well, this is the north we made. It is what it is. And it is what it isn’t.” ■

Bob Wilson, YK Centred, takes place Dec. 2 through May 2025, at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories

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