For its twenty-fourth edition, the Images Festival selected Halifax-based artist James MacSwain as its showcased Canadian artist. The selection of MacSwain was in keeping with the Images Festival’s mandate of highlighting artists who have produced considerable bodies of work — earning them a reputation among the regional, national and international experimental film and media-arts communities — but who also deserve greater exposure.

MacSwain is a prankster, with a wicked sense of humour and a voice-over, which is idiosyncratic in its tone and timbre. The Halifax-based filmmaker initially worked with puppet theatre, and that aesthetic is evident throughout his more than 20 films made over a 30-year period. Collage has always been central to MacSwain’s practice as well — certainly with his animation films, but also with his “documentary” and even dramatic works.

The one-hour program presented by the Images Festival consisted of six films made between 1983 and 2010. Five animated films were anchored by MacSwain’s 1983 performative “documentary,” Amherst, in which the artist revisits the small town he has finally left nearly twenty years earlier. MacSwain realized that he was queer in his hometown, before the Stonewall riots and before Canadian Liberal Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau’s assertion that the state has no business in the nation’s bedrooms. He performs a site-by-site inventory (or autopsy) on the town before reminding the viewers that this film is itself a performance, or fiction, and that the author’s voice therefore cannot be taken at any face value.

In MacSwain’s films, the stars may look very different today, but the films are not escapist. The artist sharply distinguishes between the fantastic and the escapist. If Amherst is an example of backwards time travel, many of MacSwain’s other films invoke the future or the undefined. His cutout floating characters move across both time and space into indeterminate zones characterized by uncanny sequences of events. MacSwain plays with outer space voyages, but there are a hell of a lot of ghosts in this film too. And he never loses his sense of place or bearing. Nova Scotia Tourist Industries (1998) is the most acerbic example of this grounding. A copywriter for the provincial tourism department devises a plan to attract tourists. He pitches locations for the ideal natural environments for the perfectly realized suicide. The word macabre does not even begin to describe this film.

MacSwain’s collagist approach to animation and indeed to filmmaking provides departure points for his imagination and socio-political concerns. Flower (1986) literally references the properties of flowers to stem or branch out into an environmental probe into tropes of fashion, war, stardom and socially perpetuated illusions. Starboy (2006) also casts a humorous yet caustic eye on the illusion industries. For MacSwain, the stars are the ones in the sky and not the deluded fools who come and go on Earth. He is truly a Warholian pagan — individuals enjoy their brief bursts of flame and then they burn out according to the laws of gravity.

Throughout the program, even into the films such as The Alpha Expedition (2000) and Fountain of Youth (2010), which deploy relatively larger budgets, MacSwain stands out as a time-honoured collagist. He uses stop-motion editing, frame by frame by frame, etc. Each frame is composed hands-on, in the manner of a classical visual artist. MacSwain considers himself a collagist taking his cues from the Dadaists and Surrealists (the anti-dreamers and the dreamers). Collage has of course become the language of advertising and music videos and image saturation, but MacSwain holds steadfastly to his belief that collage can subvert assumptions about gender, sexuality and other assumed linearities.

James MacSwain’s well-attended retrospective program served as an effective kickoff to the body of the 2011 Images Festival. At the post-screening reception, more than one voice could be heard commenting upon MacSwain’s images of severed baby heads among the delirious debris to be found in Starboy. This program both satisfied the modernist imperative to shock, while skewering its tendency toward avant-garde bravado. This retrospective of James MacSwain’s films proved that controversy and pleasure are soul mates indeed.

Juan Ortiz-Apuy’s Fountain Mist is disorienting, like the moment a dream snaps into a nightmare. You are not here. A spectre haunts the mixed-media installation, stalking through the sheen of blues, oranges, and yellows—the spectre of someone else’s dream being imposed on you, also known as advertising.

The dream is at its eeriest in a series of six framed digital collages (96 x 73 cm) that line two of the walls of the Owens Art Gallery. Each collage in the series of alternating Sunlight-yellow and Windex-blue backdrops foregrounds a glittering silver hand, with fingers slathered in paint. The thumb and middle fingers touch, pinching as if to snap, presenting objects ranging from a perfume bottle to a parrot. The formulaic goal of advertising—to produce new desires and promise their realization through a proffered commodity—is superficially obscured given the absence of brand names and inclusion of various other seemingly random objects in the frame. These collage images are unified by their origin in the stock databases from which Ortiz-Apuy downloaded them.

“One of the important things about the installation I think is the logic that I used for putting it together. I was interested in this idea of stock,” Ortiz-Apuy remarked in an interview with the Owens Art Gallery. “Stock, for me, represents this idea of mass production of something that is equally reproduced ad infinitum.”

“Fountain Mist” sounds like the name of SodaStream flavour, and of course it is one. It is also the name for the colour of a paint. Two additional product names are inscribed in the exhibition, “Bestå” and “Olov.” Ortiz-Apuy has combined the Ikea products—a storage unit and a desk, respectively—into a disjointed white display table, which sits atop a 6 x 8 x 1 foot black box at the centre of the room.

Various objects have been placed on the table. A small yellow-green pot with three artificial bananas rising out of it like preening dolphins. An unlabeled lime shampoo bottle. Two 3D-printed sculptures of amalgamated stock objects, shaped like skeletal models of knee joints, doubling as desk lamps or hour glasses. The only organic item, a bonsai tree, is also the only one that rests on the black box.

The black box’s presence in the centre of the room makes it harder to know how to navigate the space, though you do not long for the floor arrows that direct your movement through Ikea showrooms.

Ortiz-Apuy has left the Ikea stickers on the white display table, perhaps since the Swedish names are so suggestive in light of the exhibition’s interest in how commodities speak. Bestå translates as “remain” or “consist of” and Olov as “ancestor’s descendant.” Ortiz-Apuy complements these connotations by including two small stone talismans from his native Costa Rica, which are each more than 400 years old. This gesture of including the artifacts situates the commodity form in a larger historical frame. It might likewise hint at the hopefully damning question of what future anthropologists could glean about capitalist social relations through the mass consumption of—and reverence for—global, yet Swedish, standardized furniture that is produced on the only kind of supply chain possible, i.e., one that simultaneously concentrates and disperses exploitation. The stickers say “Made in China” and “Made in Poland,” referencing Ikea’s two biggest suppliers of cheap labour.

The hands in Ortiz-Apuy’s digital collages do not “make” anything; they are ornamental, there only to present objects. Assembled elsewhere, the prefabricated objects on display produce an intense feeling of dislocation that resonates with how commodities are produced and circulate within
capitalism.

Such dislocation is integral to the commodity form, given the nightmare of commodity fetishism. As Marx famously describes the phenomenon in Volume 1 of Capital (1867): “the definite social relation between men themselves […] assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”

Ortiz-Apuy’s objects interact, though not so much in the obfuscating, sense of exchange-value, but rather through replication and juxtaposition. Ortiz-Apuy describes the associations between objects in terms of the archaeological concept of “sympathetic magic.”

“I’m interested in mimesis or, more than anything, sympathetic magic,” Ortiz-Apuy told the Owens. “This idea of something sort of drawing power from something else by means of likeness or imitation.”

Power coursing through and between objects…might this be how an advertiser dreamily repackages the nightmare of commodity fetishism?

Foster, Chris. 1977 GMC. Various materials. 2012. Courtesy of the artist

Halifax-based artist Chris Foster’s Frontiers in Real Estate explores contradictory themes of civilization—its fear stories, misguided good intentions and self-indulgent sincerities. Foster’s dark humour is never moral, at least not overtly. Composed of serigraphs, collage and small sculpture, his work considers the history of consumption, both visual and commercial, with a tongue-in-cheek objectivity. “I’m interested in engaging a broad audience, despite their politics,” explains Foster during our phone conversation. “My work is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. At first it is very accessible, but underneath it is very critical of culture. People don’t like to be jabbed in the eyes right away; everything needs to be veiled.”

Three works begin the series of serigraphs, depicting communities of wooden structures. There are no figures, and therefore the emphasis is on the buildings and their allusion to human resourcefulness. Can Do (2011) is reminiscent of the illustrations of the sites of early European explorers, such as Samuel de Champlain’s Habitation at Port Royal (1604). In Stay Free (2011), a vehicle is dismantled and incorporated into the construction. A black flag flies; the place has no allegiances. In Abandon Ship (2012), Foster has depicted a Noah’s ark-type structure surrounded by burnt forest, flying an upside-down Canadian flag. Later serigraphs include Com Tower (2012), Com Tower #2 (2012) and Com Tower #3 (2012), in which communication towers have been transformed into high rise wooden houses. These are hermit dwellings with a million dollar view.

A second body of work is composed of small models of wooden homes built on the backs of motor vehicles, with names like 1977 GMC ‘Wrecker’; 1977 Chevy Van; 2 n’1 JEEP CJ-7; and Suzuki ST30 ‘Post Car.’ Foster was inspired by the 1979 publication Rolling Homes, which surveys mobile homes converted from pickup trucks, school buses and big rigs. These individually crafted houses on wheels combined the spirit of the old-timey covered wagon and the mobility of contemporary motor vehicles, forming an original artistic and cultural movement based in a do-it-yourself tradition that continues today.

History is punctuated with waves of escapism, particularly in response to major socio-economic shifts. The Industrial Revolution brought mass tourism, as the newly formed middle class left the city for excursions in the countryside. Modern mobile culture came to fore with the Great Depression, and continues to be a preferred method of escape for various subcultures. It seems to reappear with every generation, arriving in response to the horrors of war, of mass crass commercialism and fears about pollution. Now, when the decline of the Western empire seems really quite tangible, it only makes sense that some should wish to pick up and drop out. Foster agrees, with a caveat: “There’s something about e time that we’re living in, with its economic pressures, that makes escape seem really romantic.” The idea of retreating into the natural world is seductive for Canadians still, “despite the fact that we’re poisoning nature and have an increasingly abstract notion of nature. It’s all rooted in fantasy.”

The third series features black and white collages, cut from the pages of a publication by Foster titled New Civilizations. Using a mixture of photos taken largely from National Geographic magazines, Foster combines old and new imagery to create improbable landscapes. Ancient civilizations and modern towers are unabashedly paired, as are piles of tires and decaying towers. One image shows a cathedral mostly buried in the sea, as two amused but relaxed individuals stand on the beach to admire it. Kate Walchuk aptly describes the tone of this series in her intro for New Civilizations: “Relics from these dead civilizations are contemplated with mere sentimentality; they function as kitsch destinations for world travelers and history buffs.

Each collage only becomes strange after a good hard look; it is often difficult to see evidence of scissors. But the cutting and pasting is there and speaks to Foster’s honesty of process and material. The decision could also be considered a nod to 19th century composite tourist imagery, prevalent in Europe and North America— photographers and postcard producers, confined by available technology, would often cut and paste objects into scenes. Their emphasis was not on being factual, but to formulate an arguably “true” representation of a visitor’s experience. Foster’s collages have the same intentions; verity is not important here, but rather the slow shock of juxtaposition that we encounter when viewing the image, and with that, a message that rings true.

Much like the tourist imagery to which he alludes, Foster has made his work readily available for purchase by the public, and has constructed each piece so that it can be efficiently transported home. “Maybe if this was a different time, I’d be working in large sculpture or paintings, but living and working as an artist in Canada is not viable in that way. Paper-based work and small sculpture are part of a creative process that I can ship. It can seek out audiences in different places.” The exhibition will continue to Fredericton, New Brunswick, and Dawson City, Yukon. It will develop and change for each venue.

As dystopic as Foster’s message may be, it comes with a wink. His “frontier” is a concept, a psychological state of change and possibility. For him, it is in small gestures of rebellion that change can be effected.