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Consumer Communion by Guy Babineau
Rare is the artist who intelligently tackles the vagaries of consumer culture without using a subtextual sledge hammer to manipulate the viewer’s response. But criticizing vacuity doesn’t take much imagination. How much insight can there be in pointing a finger at fluff? If the MacDonald’s arch, Nike swoosh and Tommy Hillfigger label don’t mean anything, then why are they pervasive? Why are we consumed by them?
The refreshing, bold, masterful oil paintings of Vancouver area artist Chris Woods challenge the sniff of contempt endemic to cultural criticism by dramatically evoking our increasing comfort level, even joy, inspired by the icons and environments of instant life. In a sense, he plumbs the depths of shallowness, depicting a world where we are no longer consumers but have become of our own free will, the consumed. Instead of being one with the Body of Christ or rivulets in the Taoist flow, we enter divinity by embracing the symbols of corporate branding, our hearts sizzling with freshly scorched logos, hoovering fries and glugging a Big Gulp as we wait for our angel’s wings.
Some critics have called Woods’ work parody. Not only does that diminish the surprising, gentle grandeur of his paintings, a grandeur that grows the longer you keep company with them, it’s just plain incorrect. Parody is nudge-nudge, wink-wink, a collaboration between creator and audience in which both enjoy feeling superior to the object of humorous, usually nasty, derision. Woods is too serious, original and talented a painter to be dismissed as off-the-cuff.
In Stations of The Cross, Woods’ 1996 series of four paintings commissioned by an Anglican church in east side Vancouver, the artist began his exploration of, in his own words, “the transcendent moments in every day life”. Beatitude in a strip mall, and beauty. French fry and ketchup stigmatas. Soft drink dispenser epiphanies. His themes continued in the 1998 show McTopia, featuring McDonald’s counter clerks multi-armed like Hindu gods, a magician hovering over a Combo Meal, a drive-thru attendant ascending to Heaven in a McNugget rapture.
The immense new canvasses of Dreamland, a series opening in June at the Diane Farris Gallery, powerfully develop the artist’s exploration of our reverse consumption by brand names and store chains. A Gap ad in a bus stop shelter mirrors the couple waiting there. Another couple find themselves recreated on a Coke machine. The Shroud of Turin becomes a shroud of lifestyle magazines.
Woods grew up and still lives at the far end of the Fraser Valley outside Vancouver, which extends deeper into The Bible the further east you get from the city, where the only place for young people to hang out is the fastfood joint in the local strip mall. He comes by his subject matter honestly, and with some obvious affection. His traditional technique of figurative realism in oil is matched with an infectious playfulness. It’s seductive. His paintings consume the viewer. Which is probably the point.
Originally published in Azure, Canada's leading magazine about design and architecture. © Guy Babineau 2003-2004
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