Brenda Francis Pelkey Documents Reality

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A retrospective survey by Brenda Francis Pelkey, one of Canada’s leading photo-based artists, is a lesson in contemporary art history. Just consider her materials: starting with black-and-white silver-based prints on paper in the 1980s, she moved into saturated, shiny Cibachromes in the 90s. Paper gave way to aluminum in the Naughts. And now she uses inkjet on bonded aluminum.

Her latest pictures float on the walls with no frames – the display standard for contemporary, large-format photography today. That particular form of display can be read as a symptom of photography’s struggle with its tenuous grasp on its own materiality, which goes some way to explain why photo-based work, in the late 20th century and beyond, became the medium of choice for critical artistic practice.

But of course, it’s the indexical nature of the photographic image that really accounts for its hold on critical discourse, and it’s what drew Francis Pelkey to the camera. Unlike painting or writing, the photograph is a mechanical reproduction: its subject was actually there.

Pelkey's exhibition, on view until April 15 at the College Art Galleries at the University of Saskatchewan, where she taught for a decade before moving to the University of Windsor, opens with her early documentary work. The Foundry series (1987-1989), is full of tropes: black and white, exposed film rebate (a sign of the means of production), real light, real people (the proletariat): reality! And even though she went on in subsequent work to question the truth-claims of the tradition, she never really left it. Francis Pelkey’s entire oeuvre should be considered as documentary.

The hot-colour panoramas of a later series, ... the great effect of the imagination on the world, seem the polar opposite of The Foundry pictures. Here she deploys big movie lights and trains them on the spectacular, outsider works of landscape art she found in Caswell Hill, a Saskatoon enclave. The creators are almost lost in the profusion of chachkas, but there they are, staring back and taking ownership. Writing in the lavish exhibition catalogue produced by the Art Gallery of Windsor, which is circulating the show, art historian Martha Langford astutely observes that the presence of these subject-creators allows us to keep a safe distance, preventing us from imaginatively projecting ourselves into their worlds.

It may be that Francis Pelkey sensed this back in 1990 when she finished the series. Except for the blurred body fragments in a series of photo-text works done in 2000, all her subsequent work is devoid of people.

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Brenda Francis Pelkey, "Court, Cobourg," 2005

Brenda Francis Pelkey, "Court, Cobourg," 2005

printed large format 2016, inkjet on bonded aluminum, 40" x 65" (collection of the artist)

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Brenda Francis Pelkey, "Cheetah’s," 2004

Brenda Francis Pelkey, "Cheetah’s," 2004

colour photographic print mounted on aluminum, 40" x 72" (collection of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown, gift of the artist)

The works in Spaces of Transformation (2003-2008), are beautifully lit, carefully composed photographs of interior, public spaces. Handsome as they are individually, it’s really the conceptual logic of the series as a whole that gives each picture its strength and clear vision, forcing us to ask, for instance, what a strip club has in common with a courtroom. Francis Pelkey says it’s the extreme narrative potentials of the spaces that bind them, their capacity for “threshold experiences.”

Francis Pelkey’s latest images, the Site series from 2013 onward, are masterly studies in form and light. The fraught content of her earlier work has passed. They are profound pictures of emptiness. ■

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