Juggernaut

Overview

Around 1990, I began to photograph my local surroundings. I was interested in how the forces of history, the economy and modernity, revealed themselves through the surface of the quotidian. At the time, I had a friend who had become a photojournalist and was documenting violent conflicts in Asia. I reasoned that one could also stay home in Vancouver and picture the slow war of the everyday economy. I was not interested in the rhetoric of the documentary, and decided instead to make Realist tableaux. I am as inspired by painting and cinema as much as by photography and see my work in a dialogue with other depictions and their traditions. My videos are non-narrative and I think of them as “breathing tableaux”. After a time it became clear that the old problems of genre, and of the picturesque and the rustic, were central to my work. Today these problems seem no more resolved, nor less relevant.


This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 8.