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.

My expectations of Yellowstone had been too high. I’d conceived of the natural world as something distinct and separate from the human world—a faulty division at best. As environmentalist Bill McKibben famously states, we are living “at the end of nature.” Human activity has permeated the natural world to such a degree that our idealistic notions of where nature ends and we begin no longer hold water. “An idea, a relationship, can go extinct, just like an animal or a plant,” explains McKibben. “The idea in this case is ‘nature,’ the separate and wild province, the world apart from man to which he adapted, under whose rules he was born and died.”

In this issue of Visual Arts News, a handful of artists explore the creation and collapse of boundaries between human-made and natural worlds. Emerging photographer Declan O’Dowd explores the barriers that humans erect between themselves and the wild. O’Dowd’s photographs of Lunenburg County portray curiously decorated fenced-in gardens, designed to keep local deer from devouring produce. Only as Visual Arts News writer Veronica Simmonds learns, local residents often feel penned-in themselves by these constructions of their own design. Halifax-based artist Chris Foster explores our escapist tendencies in his recent travelling exhibition Frontiers in Real Estate. Foster often depicts the mobile home, those traveling temperature-controlled habitats that we rely on when we wish to experience nature, without actually being in it. Ironically, both artists depict humans caught up in almost futile struggles to keep nature at bay, while the actions of our species have already penetrated each and every layer of the globe.

Writer Paul Wapner succinctly characterizes the fusion of the natural and artificial human-made worlds in his book Living Through The End of Nature. “Humans, animals, plants, and machines are now morphing into each other … ” he writes. With irrevocable advances in fields such as biotechnology, nanotechnology and pharmacology, “we are not so much circumscribing nature as splicing ourselves into its very processes …” The human tendency to insert ourselves into the processes of the natural world has long been a source of cultural unease—Mary Shelley issued a grisly warning to the scientific community when she penned Frankenstein, the science fiction novel about the crazed scientist Dr. Frankenstein who created a living creature, known simply as “the monster,” out of composite parts. “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together,” writes Shelley in her diary while on a summer tour of Europe in 1816. “I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life … Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous Creator of the world.”

We often feel a similar sense of unease—the sense that some spiritual boundary has been crossed—when faced with imagery in which the hidden secrets of the body are exposed, dissected and “unnaturally” rearranged. The materials and processes involved in the creation of American artist Pat Hickman’s work, can induce an initial response of repulsion. Hickman’s work, recently on view as part of Dalhousie Art Gallery’s exhibition A Very Long Engagement, breathes new light into once living organic materials, mainly the intestinal lining of hogs. The work literally turns the natural world inside out, forcing viewers to consider the fact that the systems and processes governing their own bodies will one day too collapse. And it is at this moment of realization that the line between ‘us’ and ‘nature’ evaporates, as our tendency to label nature as ‘other’ is prompted largely by a secret desire to outsmart death, a mad denial of our own mortality. But as a second glance at Hickman’s work—delicate and meticulous arrangements of inert matter into hauntingly beautiful wall-hangings and sculptures—its those “monsters” we create when we wish to hold on just a little longer that lend our lives at the threshold of nature and artifice their colour.