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| Chris Woods |
Wearing looks of firm resolve, two McDonald’s employees salute one another
in a parking lot, each one holding onto the corner of a bag of takeout.
Another headset-wearing McWorker, a service-industry Shiva, holds burgers, Cokes
and other items in her eight arms.
A bored-looking couple sit in a bus shelter, oblivious to their precise reproduction
in the shelter’s Gap poster.
A long-haired man sits at a table in a fast food restaurant, with dabs of ketchup
in the palm of each hand. His female friend pokes a french fry into her stigmatic
companion’s palms.
These are some of the generic-looking characters that populate the mass-market
dreamworld of British Columbian artist Chris Woods, whose hyperrealistic canvases
have been reproduced on the covers of Adbusters and Saturday Night magazine.
For the past decade, Woods has choreographed friends and acquaintances in ironic
juxtopositions with suburban backgrounds, which he photographs and then projects
onto large canvases in his modest studio, reproducing them in oils.
Common Ground spoke to the 33-year-old artist from his studio in Chilliwack,
where he is working on his latest commission, the cover of the next Bare Naked
Ladies album.
Mining megamall culture for scenes that deconstruct the bright and shining lies
of big-budget advertising, Woods has become something of the Norman Rockwell for
the No Logo generation. He welcomes the comparison to America’s master mythmaker
in oils, knowing he is every bit as much a product of his time as Rockwell was.
"I’m like the flipside of that optimistic patriotism," he says.
"I like a lot of the feel of what he didI’m not necessarily subverting
it, but adding a extra layer to it."
Like Rockwell, Woods is a master draftsman a rarity in an age where creativity
has been disconnected from technical skill, and art is whatever you can get away
with.
Woods’ paintings, elaborate visual puns really, trade on the electric tension
between the promises sold to us by the mass market, and ages-old religious beliefs
and rituals. This collision between the profane and the sacred produces a comic
incandescence on his canvases (Author Douglas Coupland calls his paintings "the
modern equivalent of stained glass windows").
The artist lives and works in the Fraser Valley, which might lead you to suspect
he has an ambivalent relationship to the suburban culture he addresses in his
paintings. Is living in the Belly of the Beast the way to go, inspiration-wise?
"We’re obviously surrounded by mall culture," he responds. "The
suburbs are really a better place to engage in broad popular mall culture, rather
than right downtown, in the city, where you have kind of a more rounded, sane
kind of life." He laughs as he offers this assessment.
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| Chain of Command
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Woods adds that "cookie-cutter suburbs" are more of an interesting
place to live, "because here I can really see Where the rubber meets the cultural road."
Many of the characters in his paintings are buddies, and the backgrounds are the
eerily could-be-anywhere landmarks of the local strip-mall economy.
Is the restaurant stigmatic, and the other lost souls he portrays wandering the
mass-market wilderness, meant to be funny, sad, or poignant? Woods leaves interpretations
open to the viewer. But I find myself wondering this: by conflating images from
religion and myth with brand-name advertising, does the suburban artist accomplish
the final triumph of pop art, with all its turbo-charged irony: empty ALL belief
systems of purpose and meaning?
Perhaps his food-court acolytes and Gap-smacked mall rats, alternately beatified
and bored, have nothing more to offer than their acquiescence to the consumer
dream. Yet is Woods suggesting that pre-market religion, myth, and visionary experience
are just as illusory as the idea of salvation through advertising? If we have
a choice between illusions, is there any compelling reason not to choose the Golden
Arches over the golden rule?
"It’s always my intent to focus on popular culture, and use elements
of the sacred to criticize that," Woods says after a pause. "Frankly
it never occurred to me to sort of dissect organized religion, but I’m not
one to say that’s not a legitimate interpretation."
At their best, Woods’ paintings succeed in deconstructing the myth-making
bunk of big advertising with a gimlet wit. Yet his early paintings don’t
have quite the same bite they did a decade earlier. By now most of us know the
drill on consumerism and the mental environment advertisers create.
Today, irony is the second language of everyone from mall rats to Madison Avenue
advertising executives. That motto of critical abandonment, "whatever leaps
from the lips of grandmothers." Especially now that advertisers themselves
are playing the antimedia card in shilling product cleverly deconstructing their
own propaganda, while ensuring you remember the brand name the only option for
postmodern artists like Woods to go is deeper, to places the advertisers won’t.
Having expertly mined the sacred/profane vein for nearly a decade, Woods says
he now moving toward "darker kind of work," shifting from small consumer
goods to the car culture. The focus of the new work is "not so much that
we consume cars, as we are consumed by the car."
He describes his new work as more "brooding" than the "cheery,
chipper" paintings he’s known for, with their sunlit tableaux of duty-bound
food proles with sharp pleats.
It will be interesting to see what Woods does with North American Autogeddon.
With his sharp sense of irony and unerring brush, no painter in Canada has a better
fix on the distemper of our times.
Woods’ painting will be part of a group showing at the Dianne Farris
art gallery in September.
To see additional works by Woods, visit www.diannefarrisgallery.com
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