REVIEW | Xtra!
Photographic farrago
From snowmen to real men
By Andrew F McPhail
June 1988
Times have changed. On a trip down Queen Street you notice a familiar-looking blue, green and red poster jostling the tattered ads for bands that paper vacant wall space. This is General Idea’s AIDS Poster Project.
The design for the poster was appropriated from Robert Indiana’s word image, Love, a ’60s pop icon recognizable to most North Americans of that vintage. This reworked version plays on our changing attitudes towards lifestyles and sexual responsibility. At YYZ you’ll find the gallery wallpapered with the poster and a selection of General Idea videos on view. Irony rules.
Alex Turner’s show of recent photographic images at EXTRA! features serial groupings of colour works that have been manipulated through various pieces of video equipment. The end results glorify the rich and painterly qualities of video “snow.“
Vern composite 1, 1987
The most moving works in the show are based on a series of images that began with an autobiographical snapshot of Turner and his friend Vern on the beach at English Bay in Vancouver circa 1959. In the background, you can see the figure of a man in black trunks. In the foreground of the reprocessed images image you see Turner, circa 1987. What you imagine you can see between the static is memory and the undercurrents of desire and grief that Turner makes visible.
The images are layered and distorted, the colour is synthetic and rich, the figures are often simply silhouettes. Turner‘s work is interesting, because of his expressive power, particularly in the way he uses electronically generated colour with emotional clarity and strength….
Alex Turner. June 1 - 3-. At XTRA!, 464 Yonge. 925-6665