Graeme Patterson

The prairie gothic romance often begins when a rural transplant is called home by a family crisis. Adventure follows: the road trip, the awkward arrival, a secret, conflict, love and resolution. The narrative resonates here because many prairie urbanites are not long off the farm and anticipate or dread the call to return. Some never feel quite at home in the city. Perhaps it’s all that time spent neither quite here nor there—on the road between worlds. Perhaps it’s guilt at having turned heel on an authentic but mismatched life. They’re proud of their roots but happy not to be entangled in them. Even those of us raised in the city have relations in small towns or reserves, or at least we make seasonal trips to, or through, the land. When driving by the perkier villages, just off the better asphalt, we imagine what life would be like there or there or there. Drive-by speculators invest the landscape with possible lives.

Graeme Patterson may once have been an inside outsider, but no longer; he returned. A descendant of pioneers of Woodrow, Saskatchewan, he recently moved into his grandfather’s house and machine shop. There he constructs scale versions of the town’s buildings and brings them to life with DVD and video projections, animatronics and synthesizer music. The large models rest on isolated workbenches, sawhorses and other improvised piers in a gallery dimly lit by the small monitors and screens.

Woodrow is a fragmented and noisy world floating in evening. An old woman plays haunting tunes—reminiscent of the score from the 1962 drive-in cult classic, Carnival of Lost Souls—on a hyperbolic pipe organ in an empty church while two men bowl in the basement lanes. Mice and snakes infest a farmhouse. A silent, Chautauqua-style animated film, Romancing the Farm, plays in the barn/theatre. Other sculptures include a grain elevator, a landfill, three silos and two out-buildings clumped together and showing little DVDs of the shenanigans of Pierre and Gerard, and animatronic deer whose heads turn and eyes flash red as if reflecting an oncoming truck.

The hockey arena is a reconstructed and elaborated memory. Either a ruin or just incomplete, it features an improbable jumbotron perched on the half-Quonset roof. Like the church with its oversized organ, the rink conflates small-town memories and big-city aspirations. The rink is built like a table hockey game and players are static, but above, on the jumbotron video, they play and brawl in a stop-animation replay of a LaFleche vs. Woodrow game circa 1972. The hometown wins.

Woodrow plays on memory and fiction and the paradoxes of reproduction and representation on many, often hilarious, levels. In the model of the artist’s workshop, for example, are miniature versions of all the models that fill the exhibition, including the workshop itself. And the videos in the buildings actually use those same buildings as sets for the making of the videos. In fact, the whole of Woodrow is a set for yet another movie. The sketchy and dilapidated buildings are painstakingly constructed from foam core and wood but not with the detail that would satisfy a dedicated miniaturist. The construction is only “good enough” because it’s designed for the camera as a movie set for Monkey and Deer, Patterson’s magical, 12-minute, stop-action animated DVD playing in the back of the gallery. A mangy monkey and a deer romp through the buildings in a game of chase and dare that eventually leads them to the hockey rink, where the monkey’s hat becomes a puck. The monkey has a fall, seems to die and is revived by the deer. The figures may be a composite self-portrait. The artist is both local (deer) and exotic (monkey). The animals cannot improve the town, only survey the damage and play among the ruins.

The flickering animations create a melancholic feeling. The inhabitant ghosts are clinging to glory days and trying to keep up repairs in the hope that a generation might return, or they just haunt the place with repetitive signs of their former lives. The mechanical cycles—endless organ music, looped bowling and hockey games, automated grain elevator and shop machinery— begin as novel and fun but soon become Sisyphean.

Patterson does not replicate Woodrow so much as he uses it as a base for an imaginary utopia especially suited to him. Other than the organist, the folks are all male. There are no families or mixed couples. There are men alone, men in couples and teams of men. It is a confirmed bachelor’s paradise, an introverted male adolescent fantasy of a very particular sort: a Twilight Zone town of ’round-the-clock making and fixing, playing and exploring, sports, fighting and underwear jokes. The installation is a prairie gothic romance in which our hero returns to the home of his ancestors to find a ghost town inhabited by mirrored reflections of his desire. The effect is both amusing and wonderfully creepy. ■

Graeme Patterson’s Woodrow was exhibited at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon from September 7 to November 4, 2007, and at the Illingworth-Kerr Art Gallery in Calgary from November 24, 2007, to February 17, 2008. It will then travel to The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery in St John’s, exhibiting from May 3 to September 7, 2008.

David Garneau is a painter, writer, curator and Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Regina.