“It’s Good Enough Here”

The five photo-based artists making up this breezy and ultimately invigorating little exhibition with the slightly dispiriting title, “It’s Good Enough Here,” while determined to “embrace and explore the contemporary landscape,” do so, according to the LE Gallery’s press release, in order to present their images “as a record of the current status of nature within our industrialized and developed nation.”

This is assuredly a noble objective, and a compelling one too. It was unlikely, of course, that the exhibition’s five contributing artists—Vid Ingelevics, Lisa Klapstock, Jimmy Limit, Lisa Stinner and Michael Taglieri (who also co-curated the show, with LE Gallery director Wil Kucey)—were going to be able to offer anything more than an imagistic skirmish with, a glancing blow at, the current status of nature in our radically denaturalized world (or, as the artists put it so precisely and modestly, our “nation”).

Their avowed ambitions for the exhibition notwithstanding, the five contributors to “It’s Good Enough Here” (every time I type the title, it seems stranger) can scarcely be said to have pulled together, annealing their disparate photos into a coherent thesis.

Except perhaps in this way: while Ingelevics’s wood piles, Klapstock’s focus-dependent gardens, Limit’s bottle rockets and girls purveying clouds of coloured smoke (Sarah Smoke), Stinner’s wan, scrubby nature-leftovers and Taglieri’s rather unexpectedly majestic, black and white Suburban Glaciers (snowbanks) certainly spin off in their own directions, they can be said to have left behind, for our consideration, at least some tentative demonstration of the shaky, poignant, almost embarrassingly delimited tracings of the built environment’s forays into what used to be nature, and nature’s determined and possibly unvanquishable attempts at the reclamation, in opposition to “industrialization and development,” of its own turf.

But maybe that’s only what I’d like to think is going on here. Vid Ingelevics, for example, has supplied what feels like the strongest, most exclamatory works in the exhibition—his four woodpile photos. The force of Ingelevics’s charming studies of the various ways people stack and secure wood lies in the degree to which they are clarified, bounded, immediately enjoyable shards of a taxonomy of wood piling (the differences in stacking designs and approaches are absorbing). It’s hard to see, however, how these minimalist, additive stacks of wood, most of them rural—the fruits of years of conventional piling wisdom—can contribute very centrally to an index of the current state of nature in the industrialized world.

Lisa Klapstock’s two Depiction Pictures are detachable from the exhibition’s thesis in the same way as Ingelevics’s woodpiles are. Her shuttered, comparative exercises in progressive focus (on a zinnia, is it?) are powerfully palpable reminders of the way in which we look but do not see. There’s a good deal of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “inscape” idea in Klapstock’s work, and it would be pleasurable to explore it. But seeing and not seeing and trying to see are generalized human tasks and challenges and, like the woodpiles, come to rest and realization somewhere beyond the exhibition’s parameters.

Jimmy Limit’s two smoke bomb/bottle rocket photos may well offer (for all I can tell) what the show’s press release calls “a phantasmagoric depiction of juvenile isolation” but I’m not sold on the way his “images of homemade weapons and portraits taken in the midst of smoke bombs evoke compassion for those left bored and alone.” They didn’t evoke any in me. Anyway, what happens to nature in Limit’s work except that it gets compromised by chemicals? I suppose that’s the “state of nature” point to be made here.

It was really Michael Taglieri and Lisa Stinner who held the show to its appointed course. Stinner’s seductive photographs of ragged, hopeful, but clearly token patches of planting (and wild compensatory passages of scrub growth) nestled up to banal and brutal buildings tellingly position “nature” as a saved remnant of a former condition (something too tentative to function as a return of the repressed natural world). Especially poignant in this regard was her Toronto (White Sand) photo, where a huge iceberg-like pile of white sand seems ready to engulf what are already isolated and vulnerable containers of “plant material”—the bagged and potted plants and shrubs waiting out the seasons in the yard of a garden supply outlet.

Michael Taglieri’s stirringly handsome black and white photos of the epically scaled snowbanks (his term, “urban glaciers,” is a little puzzling) you find in the middle of shopping mall parking lots were, for me, however, the most poetically forceful of the disparate works making up “It’s Good Enough Here.” Taglieri’s momentary “mountains” of dirty snow are not only ambiguously scaled—and therefore easy to transform back and forth from alpine peaks to lowly piles of slush and back to alpine peaks again (Talglieri’s careful management of foreground and horizon makes it possible)—but are also movingly informed by the idea of landscape as memory, as flickering recollection. This is how nature stands now, isn’t it? As a fleeting thought, as ad hoc as a poster in a travel agent’s window? ■

“It’s Good Enough Here,” curated by Wil Kucey and Michael Taglieri, was exhibited at LE Gallery in Toronto from November 9 to December 2, 2007.

Gary Michael Dault is a critic, poet and painter who lives in Toronto.