“Place,” on display this month at the Blue Sky Gallery, is a generically but aptly-titled collection of photographs by the Canadian architect/photographer Geoffrey James. The show serves to document, in deadpan fashion, the changing landscape of a southern Canada town and recalls the industrial limbos and stilted landscapes of Lewis Baltz's work of the 1970s.
Taken with an 8x10 view camera, some prints are truly stunning. Printed entirely neutral, in shades of matted grey, putting greens crop up as oddly symmetrical blemishes, inhibiting expanses of rolling plains. Skies are singular blocks of grey -- they are blank slates, which leave everything else in the photograph, the cookie cutter apartment complexes, the billboards, the abandoned sand rakes, feel completely arbitrary and uneasy. In one photograph a steel bridge casts a web of its skeletal shadow, imprisoning the bluffs behind it.
The work creates an interesting dialogue when paired with the luscious mid-century, nature-beautifying contact prints in the Ansel Adam's exhibit on display next door to Blue Sky at the Charles Hartman gallery. The captivating (and eerie) bit about James's show is that his peculiar photographs are easily mistaken as landscapes in the majority of today’s rural USA, particularly in the midwest, like for instance, Glendive or Bismarck North Dakota, or Fergus Falls, Minnesota. James describes the prints as indicative of the “mess we are making all over North America of our new settlements.” Hung one after another in a long line of succession, one can follow, the blunt horizon line -- like a monitor’s flatline -- all the way out the door.
