Presented by the Scarborough Arts Council, CONTACT Scarborough is a multi-faceted project that explores issues of public and private space, representation, and notions of identity associated with Scarborough. The project includes photography, video and a podcast developed by Scarborough youth. CONTACT Scarborough considers how photographic practice is expanding and presented in time-based media while dealing with the experiences of those living in an area under-represented in the social and cultural life of Toronto.

With the Scarborough Arts Council and Mobile City Project, this podcast involves youth from Scarborough, reflecting on their images of their environment. Thanks to Angelica, Anesha, James, Tammy, Tolu, Tope, and the Boys & Girls Club of East Scarborough.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You Knew Everything There Was to Know, and photographs from Weekend Getaways, MobileCity Podcast presented at CONTACT 2008 in cooperation with the Scarborough Arts Council, Scarborough Civic Centre.

Gallery

Acknowledgements

With assistance from:

About

You Knew Everything There Was To Know is a look at the culture, nomenclature and legacy of the idea of Scarborough through the lens of a video camera. The two cities included in this video are Scarborough, Ontario and Scarborough, England.

Scarborough, Ontario began in the vision of Elizabeth Simcoe who claimed that the Scarborough Bluffs reminded her of the limestone cliffs of Scarborough, England. Places inherently manifest the visions of the makers while adapting to the changing needs of inhabitants, which is reflected in the ethnic diversity of Scarborough, Ontario. The use of the camera in this case is like a measuring device, taking stock of the landscape and the people living within it. This project is a kind of social science, (part taxonomy, part scientific investigation) of the legacies of post-colonial cities.

My work positions the viewer as an observer to the everyday, those things which are often overlooked and otherwise considered too banal for serious scrutiny. As such, my videos provoke in the viewer a sense of unheimlich, the uncanny: as the video unfolds, the familiar begins to appear as unfamiliar. As we watch what happens over a brief period of time in everyday urban and rural spaces (the abandoned street corner, the landscape of a glacial mountainside), these places begin to unfold themselves and reveal a sense of wonder. Hence the uncanny: what was previously thought of as an “empty” place, void of any real humanity, begins to point up zones of desire, commodification, growth and change.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Acknowledgements

This project is produced with the support of the support of the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council, and with the support of the Ontario Arts Council. The Ontario Arts Council is an agency of the Government of Ontario.

About

An Exhibition organized by the Way Up Way Down collective (Yam Lau, Sunny Kerr, Tania Ursomarzo).

This exhibition invites a number of artists to produce book works or related artworks in a bookstore. The structure of the exhibition is designed to adapt and travel to other bookstores in different cities and countries. New artists, especially those living in the city of the exhibition, will be added with each new show. The first exhibition will open in 23 June, 2007 at Balfour Books, Toronto.

For Titles, I created Weekend Getaways: The Vernacular Architecture of Suburbia. This is a limited edition book, hard-cover, cloth-bound with foil-blocked embossed type on the cover, of approximately 100 colour pages. The book attempts to define the styles, tropes or semiotic of suburbs primarily through photographs, annotations, automatic writing, rigidly designed text and partial diagrams. The content will simultaneously challenge and reinforce the stereotypes associated with some suburban life.

Introduction

Although it is among the best of them, Richmond is, finally and undeniably, a suburb, only that,
with all the word implies about window boxes and hedges;
about wives walking pugs; about clocks striking the hours in empty rooms.

–Michael Cunningham, The Hours

The long-held antipathy towards the suburbs maintained by advocates of urban space —exemplified here in Cunningham’s novel—is nothing new. But at the beginning of the 21^st century, that view has started to shift. An appreciation of the suburbs as an important site of study and artistic production is emerging, and Andrew McAllister is one of the artists who is bringing this about.

At once gorgeous, funny and disturbing, Weekend Getaways breaks from a stale tradition that treats the suburbs as limited and limiting; rather, the work suggests infinite possibilities for suburban exploration and reflection. Far from being a simplistic commentary on a stereotyped vacuous lifestyle, Weekend Getaways paradoxically provides viewers with an intimate glimpse of the suburbs via a methodology of detached observance.

In keeping with McAllister’s previous work, human beings are noticeably absent from Weekend Getaways. This absence lends itself to the sometimes sinister, sometimes absurd quality of the work; the wide open spaces found in many of these images can appear riddled with loneliness. But like a blank canvas, they may also suggest hope and possibility. Although no human flesh is present, the signs of human existence dot the photos: tire tracks, foot prints in the snow, graffiti tags, a blurred face at the helm of a car.

There is also real beauty, even when it is punctuated by hints of poverty or the glare of advertising. Sometimes the beauty is the result of nature butting up against the titular vernacular architecture: trees appear to emerge from restaurants, or mirrored buildings reflect fluffy white clouds. There are surprising splashes of colour, too, particularly the brilliant blue skies, or brilliant red signage sandwiched between a cloudy sky and snowy ground.

Weekend Getaways, then, effectively situates sumptuously-shot parks and windswept landscapes as prime vacation spots that beckon to readers. The actual cities in which the photos were taken are incidental; the suburban landscape presented here piques the viewer’s curiosity, much as the glossy pages of a travelogue incite wanderlust. In doing so, however, it precisely throws into question the facet of suburban life that involves getting away from it all…at your local big-box store.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of McAllister’s work is its humour. The laughs his work generates come, in part, from the element of the unexpected: where we anticipate the presence of people, there are none; this startles us into laughter. Through McAllister’s lens, strip malls and tower blocks start to seem funny, but only because our everyday relationship to these ordinary structures is suddenly detached and distanced. In the manner of Freud’s theory of the uncanny, the familiar becomes unfamiliar. We see structures we think we know intimately and yet find ourselves removed from them. The humour, then, is without condescension; it comes not from being positioned above the material but apart from it. The laughs come through as a joke on us, we humans who built the structures that, separated from their everyday context, suddenly strike us as terribly absurd.

The images found in Weekend Getaways command readers’ attention by yielding themselves quietly and gradually. They invite readers to reflect on their own built environments and perhaps those of their childhood. After all, the generic flavour of the suburbs makes it easy for anyone to identify with abandoned fields, oddball retail outlets or vast parking lots dotted with vehicles. Neither apologia nor indictment, Weekend Getaways is a beautiful and surprising reconsideration of the suburbs whose time has come.

– Sabine Hikel, PhD.

Exhibition Dates

Titles
An Exhibtion of Artists’ Book Works
organized by the WayUpWayDown collective
23 June, 07- 8 September, 07.
Opening: Saturday, 23 June, 2007 from 2-5 pm
Balfour Books. 601 College Street, Toronto, ON M6G 1B5. 416-531-9911.
noon-11pm daily

Titles II
An Exhibtion of Artists’ Book Works
organized by the WayUpWayDown collective
Wednesday, October 24 – Sunday, November 25, 07
Opening: October 24 from 7-9 pm
Amherst Books
8 Main Street, Amherst, MA 01002 USA
413.256.1547 · 800.503.5865 · books@amherstbooks.com
Hours of Operation
Monday-Saturday: 6:30 A.M. — 9:00 P.M.
Sunday: 6:30 A.M. — 5:00 P.M