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SELECTED REVIEWS Man Turned to Stone David Campion has been involved in exploring issues of colonization in his immediate environment and has collaborated with the Sto:lo community in asking provocative questions concerning the role of the artists, their relationship with the subject, and the demands of the community. Cowboy Wild Campion turns the spectacle of cowboy mythology on its head, and reflects it back as art. Campion is a genius behind the lens. These photos had me alternately wincing and laughing out loud at the way our gauzy mythmaking keeps running into inconvenient sharp, metallic and plastic facts of life. It is through visionaries like Campion that we are given another perspective. His photographs capture layers of myth mixed with actuality. Dystopia Campion has a good eye for the small gestures and coincidences that transform scenes from the realm of anecdote into art. These photographs prove the intransigence of the real, of the world that we have wrought, and that in turn shapes us: the metaculture that makes these images familiar to the inhabitants of any city in North America, and many cities on other continents. The result is hard to see but compelling to look at: we are led, however briefly, to reconsider ourselves. -- Man Turned to Stone: T’xwelatse, The Reach Gallery, April 14 - June 5, 2011 from an essay by Scott Marsden, Curator British Columbia photographer, David Campion created a series large-scale photographs depicting the human and geographic context of T’xwelatse. In the gallery, T’xwelatse was placed in the centre of the gallery so when viewers encounter him, they did so in a direct and personal way. Large photographic portraits of the current “grandmothers” (a dozen women in the T’xwelatse family carry the responsibility to care for their ancestor) hung from the ceiling in a protective circle around T’xwelatse. David Campion also created photographs that made reference to the geographic and historical context to landscape before first contract and thematically linked text to references of traditional Sto:lo life. David Campion has been involved in exploring issues of colonization in his immediate environment and has collaborated with the Sto:lo community in asking provocative questions concerning the role of the artists, their relationship with the subject, and the demands of the community. All of the key exhibition elements have been developed in collaboration with Sto:lo community leaders/elders and their consensus is that the exhibition elements were not only appropriate but also innovative and an exciting development in terms of telling the T’xwelatse story and the larger context within which it is situated. The community leaders/elders involved in the development of the exhibition are widely respected and have long experience sharing cultural perspectives both within the Sto:lo community and also with non-Aboriginal audiences. Man Turned to Stone: T’welatse provided the most comprehensive account yet assembled of the significant historical, cultural, and spiritual elements that the T’xwelatse story brings together and presented a core understanding of the Sto:lo relationship to land and resources and the worldview that underlies this relationship. In addition, there was a synchronicity between the exhibition and the mission of T’xwelatse himself which is to function as a teaching icon and share the message that we must learn to live together in a good way. The exhibition was designed with specific elements to attract community members including:
-- Cowboy Wild, Art Gallery of Calgary, September 2008 to January 2009 essay written by Marianne Elder, senior curator, Art Gallery of Calgary The images in Cowboy Wild are not the images that run on the front page of the newspaper or the sort used for promotion. Rather, Campion’s images reflect the Calgary Stampede we all know but don't always pause to consider. They are the rub of reality – what is real in a performance steeped in history and spectacle. From the origins of the Stampede, the first one held in 1912, this event has encapsulated the myth and nostalgia of an untamed West, and the heroic figure of the man who tamed it, the cowboy. David Campion's photographs of the Calgary Stampede and the modern day cowboy look beyond this performance. Having grown up in South Africa during the apartheid era, Campion understands the complication of accepted views and the stark contrasts of reality. We often easily accept what we are presented with as real and true, but with Campion’s photographs of the Stampede, we are offered an opportunity to view from a different perspective. Every year in early July, the city of Calgary performs for the world. The shops and businesses that line the streets decorate their windows and storefronts with images of the cowboy and the West - bales of hay, wooden fence facades and words like 'Yahoo'. Normally a site of commerce and business suits, during the ten days of the Stampede, Stephen Avenue in the middle of the work day is a sea of cowboy hats and boots, all of us performing, reaching back to the memory of playing dress up as kids, role playing the iconic figure of the cowboy. Within the mythic identity of this man, there exists an ideal - and a celebration of an idealized history - ranch land for as far as the eye can see, large skies that extend beyond the horizon, symbols of hope, futures that are bright. It is the story that through hard work and perseverance you can overcome, move up, progress and within that money is made, cities are built, and civic identities are solidified. The Calgary Stampede is billed as The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth; the Stampede parade is televised to over 2 million viewers. Most people have heard of the Calgary Stampede, it is a rodeo, a show, an exhibition - a celebration of the West and of the cowboy. With the Stampede, Calgary exemplifies the modern city that emerges from the ranch lands, backgrounded by the magnificence of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. This city that has been growing so fast, booming economically and rushing toward the future, was founded by the collision of the ranchman and the businessman. With pride, as citizens, we don our hats, pull on our boots and celebrate the identity that we have built. It is easy to perform – who doesn't want to be seen as a cowboy - stoic, rugged, hard working, ethical and honest. We embrace this identity as individuals and as a city. Having grown up on the other side of the Atlantic, Campion’s understanding of the cowboy was formed from the images on the silver screen. Like most of us, the narrative of the western movie with shoot-outs and trusty steeds were the formation of his childhood games. The first cowboys that Campion photographed were at the Bighorn Stampede near Caroline, Alberta where he camped with the competitors and their families. Having expected bedrolls by the campfire, he was surprised to find them watching satellite TV in their big RVs which further fueled his fascination with the cowboy hero of the West. David Campion's photographs capture the layers of the myth mixed with the reality of the actual, the cowboy of our imagination and the real McCoy. He writes the following about his experiences of cowboys at the Stampede: "For a few years I looked forward to seeing Big Joe, one of the oldest cowboys still competing, a wild horse racer who had grown up on a big spread in New Mexico and now ran cattle in northern British Columbia. One afternoon, I watched him snap a dislocated shoulder back in place by bracing it against a urinal. When Big Joe talked, other cowboys listened. When women were present, he tried not to swear and apologized if he did.” And of course, what are cowboys without their traditional counterpart? Campion writes that: “Another regular stop on my pilgrimage was the teepee of Ed Calf Robe, a Siksika elder who has been at the Stampede every one of his sixty-plus years. As a young man he rode herd on cattle and competed in rodeos. He likes to say that cowboys and Indians really got along, that Hollywood was where they fought. He remembers being a kid and watching movies where the Indians would empty the whole barrel and one cowboy would fall. Then the cowboy would shoot once and ten Indians dropped. 'We used to all want to be cowboys,' he says." The photographs in this exhibition offer us an opportunity to look beyond the image of an idealized past and to embrace the reality of the present: the cowboy riding the mechanical scooter, the modern city peeking from behind the historical façade. It is the juxtaposition in the moment that has been captured in black and white that allows us to start to understand the multiple layers of our identity - of this event. We can see the spectacle, the celebration, the nostalgia and the evidence of myth and the traces of myth making. It is in this undressing that we can begin to understand our individual place within this and we are given a chance to choose who we are in relationship to this identity that has been projected, that as a city we all take part in. In order to bring positive growth and progress and move toward the future, we need to be conscious of the present, to pause and really look, to see, to evaluate and to choose. Our identity is a creation that is built from our ideas, experiences and understandings. The Calgary Stampede is a projection to the world of our identity as a city, as a community. It produces the idea of the modern day cowboy, celebrates western history and proclaims our current relevance. We are progressive, we value our past, we're tough competitors, and we make deals with handshakes. We are the West, we are Calgarians. There is no need for analytical evaluation or judgment. These photographs document a celebration of community spirit and inclusiveness as much as they are an examination of the myth of the West and the idealized heroic figure of the cowboy. These photographs offer us opportunities to glimpse the real McCoy that exists within the multiple layers of performance and spectacle and the positive and negative aspects that are always present. They are records of a modern city's attempt to embrace its history and claim its future. It is through visionaries like Campion that we are given another perspective. I'll see you at the next Stampede. -- from reviews of the group show Atropolis - The Big Picture: Perspectives on Change, CBC Broadcast Centre, Vancouver, May to June 2003 Big Show Yields Big Favorites …David Campion’s small black-and-white photographs of people on the move caught my attention. Campion has a good eye for the small gestures and coincidences that transform scenes from the realm of anecdote into art. One image in particular, of a female pedestrian passing plastic-wrapped totem poles at the Vancouver airport, has lingered with me. It’s a graceful comment on how advanced capitalism used nature and local history to impose an ecologically and socially friendly face on its incessant expansionist plans. Change is in the Air …Curator Vjeko Sager paints an image of exile that pokes beneath the red tape and immigration papers to examine the individual’s experience of globalization. In these works, artists force us to consider the powerful internal transformation necessitated by changes in environment. essay introducing a portfolio of images from the Dystopia series City Life When David Campion returned from a year in Africa, where he had been photographing the Himba people of Namibia for the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, he decided to turn his camera on his own culture and so he went into public places to observe Canadians, as he had gone into the marketplace in Africa in order to observe the Himba. But the marketplace in Canadian cities is not so public, he quickly discovered, and guards and large men in suits frequently materialized before him in malls and emporiums to escort him and his camera to the door. Appearances, which are at the heart of the visual world, have become trade secrets in the diminishing commons of the West, or perhaps I should say in the “metaculture,” which is the term Campion uses to refer to the global nexus that permeates more and more of the world: the 9-to-5 jobs, the telephones, the hierarchy of work, the extended reach of investment capital. The Himba people in Africa, for example, are entering the metaculture through their employment as tourist attractions. In this world appearances have become commodities, and the celebration of appearances is subsumed by advertising and celebrity watching. Citizens become wary of the camera and afraid that something valuable is being taken from them when a camera is raised in their direction. Campion persists nevertheless in raising his camera toward that which is before him. The resulting photographs, as seen in these pages, are arresting, in the full sense of that word. They are not so much a split-second pause as a halting of the procedures of daily life. In these photographs we encounter the “enigma of the visible” in our own lives, rather than in the lives of others: most people who look at the images on these pages will see not a distant exotic culture, not a “subculture” or an underground, but themselves going about their lives. Here is the beginning of existential pain. These photographs prove the intransigence of the real, of the world that we have wrought, and that in turn shapes us: the metaculture that makes these images familiar to the inhabitants of any city in North America, and many cities on other continents. The result is hard to see but compelling to look at: we are led, however briefly, to reconsider ourselves. catalogue essay for Arboretum, solo show, XENO Gallery, Curator: Jordan Strom, Vancouver, April – June 2002 INOUTSIDE: languages of nature, culture, and glass in Campion’s Arboretum series Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, a central feature designed into several of the early modernist homes of more affluent patrons on the West Coast of British Columbia entailed the "living room" space of the home being buttressed on one side by a large sheet of plate glass from floor to ceiling that opened onto the exterior landscape. This glass "skin," it is argued, acts less as a way of framing or separating the outdoors, as a standard picture window with sill might, and instead unifies the two spaces into one continuous area. The glass wall is meant to simultaneously bring "the outdoors in andthe indoors out." This is reminiscent of what the writer Jose Quetglas said upon seeing Mies Van Der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion of 1928-29: “Could it be that the pavilion has no interior or that the interior is an exterior?” This concept of being inside and outside at the same time through the medium of glass, I will argue, is crucial, to the events documented in the photo series presented here by David Campion. But before we address this relationship, let us momentarily turn the discussion to a related phenomenon. Much has been made of late of the way modern life has been progressively built around a particular “exhibitionary order.” The concept of a “world-as-exhibition” stems out of the way we as modern peoples picture the world and solidify relations of power through this picturing. This exhibitionary way of knowing in the Western world, it is argued, has come about from a long process of scientific, artistic and economic techniques of reading and representing the world. It is an order built on everything from landscape painting to anthropological texts, world expos to state economic reports, action movies to coffee table books. It is not surprising then that the architecture of world exhibitions, as with the Crystal Palace in London in the World Exhibition of 1851, was derived indirectly from the architectural forms of enclosed botanical gardens and the early hothouses of the Kew Gardens in the late 18th century. The visual ideology of natural science was transplanted over the colonized world along with these techniques of power. An arboretum is, by definition, generally an outdoor place where trees, shrubs, and other woody plants are grown, exhibited and labeled for scientific and educational purposes. One of the common interchangeable byproducts of this visual logic has been the taxonomic reclassification/representation of nature and the erasure from view of indigenous peoples. In David Campion’s Arboretum photo series, we see an incision into this broader discussion. What Campion seems to be suggesting is that there is evidence supporting both the evolution away from this colonial exhibitionary process with the current incorporation of the critique, as described above, into the popular sphere and power structure, while at the same time, many of the power dynamics endemic to the “world-as-exhibition” continue through what is a reoccurring language of containment and liberation. I will start by examining the images -- The Grove, Forest Tense, and Rhetoric of Glass. Though I will read them consecutively, I doubt they are as powerful read as a narrative string, so much as if they are read in a telescopic way -- that is, consecutively interleaving each image into the others. In The Grove, landscape moves indoors. It is a recuperated space located in the undergrowth of the “Arrivals” terminal. In the place of the usual potted tree, fountain or planter shrub is a triad of wood carvings, or greeting totem poles by aboriginal artists, set on what appears to be a stony beach of pebbles with a quaint burbling brook. This sunken asymmetrical oasis, tucked up against a lowered ceiling, is dramatized by a diffused bath of light from a narrow skylight above. The location is transitional and descending. The ramp zigzags down like a miniaturized mountain switch back into a sheltering arbor away from the ceremonial space of the arrivals gate -- a move toward the authenticity of "grounding." Likewise, the escalator to the right of the diorama indicates the mechanical movement of modernity out of the experience of pre-modern life away from the "grounded self." Campion captures one individual surveying the totems from on high, face erased like the disintegrating facial features of the carved crests. As with the work of Thomas Struth or Alan Sekula2 , Campion captures the human figures in the act of looking within the institutional quasi-public spaces. Rather than represent some “lost” West Coast culture, this diorama has been produced to reassert a current living and vibrant aboriginal culture as part of a national story of shared heritage. The openness and naturalness of the display is meant to convey a seamless incorporation of this culture into the modern world. Interestingly, dioramas represent a form of display that preceded and, according to some, anticipated and shaped the “invention of photography” in the 1820s, and played an active part in recreating the colonized world for the European imagination. They effectively conveyed the illusion of reality through what Jonathan Crary has describes as the “disruption of an intelligible relation of distance between viewer and illusory scene." In addition to this “disruption,” the incorporation of materials by living artists in the transitional spaces of the contemporary airport would seem to update this form of diorama into a newer type of representation: what we might call a living diorama. The Grove, however, questions this apparent coding of liberation and "seamlessness" by capturing these three figures in a ghostly cocooned state. Theimage is at once grotesque and remystifying. These bounded forms provocatively question whether or not our modern “exhibitionary order” has been truly superceded. The designs are visible, yet barely readable, obscured as if behind veils. The shrouded figures echo the myriad of rain-damaged buildings undergoing renovations in the Lower Mainland region, or the frozen winterized succulents seen constricted in Vancouver’s front yards during the colder months. The plastic does not indicate a fakeness or inauthenticity as much as it suggests an impediment to the understanding of the meaning of the crests. Accurate understanding of the traditional meaning of these symbols, Campion proposes, is sealed away behind the natural and self-evidential construction of the diorama. In capturing these awkwardly shrink-wrapped apparitions, he is putting into question the act of assimilation of First People’s culture into official Canadian culture at this crucial moment in the history of treaty negotiations. The Grove is reminiscent of Emily Carr’s Tanoo, Queen Charlotte Islands (1913), in that it formulates a non-aboriginal view of an aboriginal sign system coordinated around welcoming other people to their land. Yet for Campion, "the gates" are now inside the village. Or, perhaps, more correctly, the gates are now inside the city; as the airport designers described the feel they were trying to attain in the $53 million renovation as “urban.”4 Ironically perhaps, the airport becomes the harbour-city in which the colonials land upon exiting the building for flight. That is, the photograph situates the viewer at the foot of the "beach" in the position of arrival specifically when they are heading in the direction of departure. Here, Campion captures the “Point of Contact” as a welcoming of peoples to depart from the airport-as-city ideal. If, as has been described, these works are installed in the attempt to shed archeological or anthropological readings, Campion has captured the setting in a moment of ambivalence and retreat. With its dramatic increase in space devoted to the exhibition of art, to say nothing of the flow of foot traffic, the Vancouver Airport could be considered the primary exhibition space in Western Canada. The diorama of totems documented in Campion’s photo represents a broader art program at the airport which amounts to 1.5% of its operating budget.5 Yet, with its shopping mall, hotel, daycare, foodcourt and banks of cable televisions this is no mere gallery. As the largest continuous structure on the West Coast of Canada, this building appears to imagine itself as a pre-eminent form of postmodern longhouse. In the second image in the series -- Forest Tense -- Campion gives us what Jorge Louis Borges has called “a line that is a labyrinth.” The darkened copse of immature trees retreating into the horizon not only reminds the viewer of the various practices deployed in rural BC to demarcate private property (snake fences, lines of post and barbed wire, ditches), but the photograph also forcefully indicates the limits of traditional discourses on property rights in respect to aboriginal and non-aboriginal land entitlement. The sense of time in the forest is important here. There is a tense, in a temporal sense, of growth, decay and regeneration; there is also the “tense” of tension of modern life, that is constitutive of the forest. The corset of lines down the heart of the forest speaks of the Euclidean quantification of space invoked in such processes as the forestry management cycle of the BC forest industry. The forestry cycle with its rigorous progression of pruning, thinning, spacing, brushing and weeding imposes a particular time onto the land. In this way, and arguably others, the space of the forest becomes abstract and governed under the rationale of profit and efficiency. Similarly, the highly bounded appearance of the forest and the strip of trees makes it appear like a schematic introductory description of perspectival space and vanishing point as it might be described on a chalkboard. Yet, Forest Tense also suggests a submerged sign of hope. It does so in its unique recreation of one of the most persistent icons in North American culture: the receding highway. The photograph, in the way it is situated, mimics a viewer’s surveying look “down” the center line of an invisible road. Yet, the viewer is submerged within the road structure of hope: the latticework of control obscuring the horizon of resolve. The windbreak of underdeveloped trees -- used to protect the fields from loss of arable soil -- is not a line at all, but an area, a common ground, a location that is both inside and outside. The positioning of the photograph is from within the line to suggest that the line is in fact an area or a zone of overlapping jurisdiction. Like a "breath" of glass in a modern home, this boundary is more than janiform (two-faced) -- a conduit and cipher between two jurisdictions which brings them together. The boundedness and tension of the photographed forest speaks of the slow but growing merger between the "jurisdiction" of modern ecological vision and traditional coastal cosmological vision as they have been slowly integrating in successive generations of societies on the West Coast of Canada. In this deeper sense, underneath its cautionary and constricting appearance, the image is hopefully suggestive of reconciliation between divided parties. In the third photograph, Rhetoric of Glass, Campion continues his dialogue of inside/outside. The photograph documents what appears to be a native figure stealthily ambushing an unaware white collar worker who is busily at work behind his desk. This figure seems frozen within a store window display: a diorama of lifestyle choice. Again, as in The Grove, faces are obscured. Yet, since the reflection of the figurative outline appears to derive from an adjacent painted figure outside the frame of the photo, most likely we can presume this to be a mural that has been sanctioned by the city. In the manner of the figure’s dress and posture, this apparition appears to refer to what Marcia Crosby has described as the construct of the “imaginary Indian.” Rather than being a figure representing contemporary Indian-ness (or a variation thereof), this chimerical outline is a drained cut-out of western culture’s exotic and constructed version of nativeness. The hovering figure is the product of a recycled and evolved European Romanticism whose image is maintained through the dossier language of the hunched over figure. This is a procedure of language making, Campion contends, which itself etches the apparition into the glass as the modern individual’s unconscious repression, like some new graffiti acid-etched onto a store window. Yet the act of ambush itself quickly dissolves into various refractions which dissipate within the contours of the modern interior. It is the transparency of the glass -- as it relates to the rhetorical transparency and radiant freedom of modernism -- that leads to the refraction and splitting apart of the unified figure. It was, after all, the influential modernist architect Mies van der Rohe, at the end of the First World War, who equated structural clarity in architecture with social emancipation, and realized it was not light and shadow that was significant in the modern era, but reflection. Yet, in Rhetoric of Glass, the representative of Western managerialism is not undergoing visual refraction at all, as is the native apparition -- instead he is turned away from "the Outside" avoiding the view of his own image as it would appear in the language of glass within that of "the other." As with the merging of the domestic interior of the "classic" modern home with its exterior, Rhetoric of Glass conveys the closeness of nature and culture through the interpenetrations of the figures. Yet, the refractions and reflections along with the turned away gaze, insinuates that the message of transparency and access is overblown. The "turning-of-the-back" of business incorporates into itself in that act the iconography of aboriginal peoples at the same time that it expropriates land. This turning away by the business class not only suggests the forceful rejection of the treaty process, but also, the facelessness of the utilitarianism, and the ensuing "crisis of memory" that lies at the root of the problem. What David Campion has achieved in this set of photographs is to resituate, in the most concise way possible, the current moment of representational practice and power relations in Western Canada within its own history. These works address the way in which nature -- and a newly acknowledged “living” aboriginal culture -- continue to be read through the lens of natural history. Under the sign of tourism and adventure, the discouses continue to approach nature as we might within an arboretum: that is in an exotifying, educational and exhibitionary manner. Likewise, these three photographic event-spaces as a fragment of Campion’s larger project, address the ways in which the modernist architectural frame of “nature” has informed this “nature” with its own language of taxonomy and freedom. In other words, the reviving of such forms as the living diorama will only truly begin to transcend our persistent “exhibitionary order” if the utopian spirit of the early modernist home is deconstructed and ultimately revived with a clear and adaptable objective of fulfilling its goals. As the work demonstrates, the ways in which we represent the land to visitors, and ultimately to ourselves, and the ways in which this story of “heritage” is enacted in collective locations like the Vancouver International Airport, are full of clues as to how this is, and is not, to be done. Perhaps the horizon line on the road to reconciliation will only appear when we begin to see the arbitrary glass lines inside our “new museums” and across our provinces in light of what was once imagined in the living room/yard of the modernist home: that is as areas not so mutually exclusive. Beatriz Columina, “Double exposure: alteration to a suburban house.” (1978) reprinted in Dan Graham (London: Phaidon), pp.82-89. This topic has been addressed various works including Timothy Mitchell’s “The world-as-exhibition.”Comparative Studies in Society and history, 31, pp.217-36. See Ray Desmond’s Kew: The History of the royal Botanical Gardens. 1995 (London: Harvill), pp.363-375). I am thinking here of work by previous photographers that addresses figures observing artworks in museum spaces, as in Thomas Struth’s Museum Photograph., or photogaphs of figures viewing art in quasi-public/private spaces, as in Alan Sekula’s project on the Bank of Canada in Sudbury Ontario in Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes. 1997 (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery). -- review of two-person show Repercussions, Helen Pitt Gallery, Vancouver, February to March 1999 Repercussions It's the opening of Repercussions, a dual exhibition at the Helen Pitt Gallery featuring the works of painter David Gooderham and photographer David Campoin. Their purpose: to examine the connections between ourselves and the political and economic transformation of the world. But though David Gooderham's portraits of terror in Reconstructing Cambodia, a look at the aftermath of the Cambodian Civil War, are heart-rending and engaging, it is David Campion's Through the Looking Glass that leaves a far deeper impression. And, while the exhibition is entitled Repercussions, I didn't expect the images to stay with me afterwards like they did. With Through the Looking Glass, Campion takes a close look at the Himba people of Namibia, whom he describes as the "last peoples balanced on the edge of the world." They've become a marginalised people whose only role in the global economy is as a tourist attraction. Through a series of black and white photographs, the confusing clash of cultural norms that they face becomes almost too clear. A tribesman squats on the side of the road, resting his hand on his face while other local residents fix their Jeep; a tribeswoman with unfettered breasts leans up against mounds of Coca-Cola crates; a young woman carefully checks her reflection through a looking glass. The harsh contrasts in the photographs are uncomfortably eerie, and it seems as if the Himba have been forced to put themselves on assimilation fast forward. Campion describes this form of neocolonialism best, for, as he says, you can almost "hear the cultural fabric rip." -- |
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