Lisa Stinner-Kun

It’s a fairly common refrain that the mid-20th century was defined by a sense of optimism. It seems unlikely that anyone would describe our current interregnum in such sanguine terms, lest they risk coming across as deluded or hopelessly naïve. These contrasting moods—both the postwar optimism and its subsequent unravelling—uneasily cohabit in “Built Persuasion,” a recent exhibition by Winnipeg artist Lisa Stinner-Kun at the Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practices (C’cap), which features a tightly curated selection of architectural photographs rendered in hyperreal clarity, vividly displayed in large-scale light boxes. By way of these laconic images of vacant mid-century modern architecture and interiors, Stinner-Kun bridges real and imagined futures, bringing into sharp relief the way the built environment absorbs shifting narratives across time.

Throughout her career, Stinner-Kun has remained remarkably faithful to architecture as a subject. Even so, “Built Persuasion”—her first solo exhibition since 2016—marks a subtle turn toward a particular niche: timeworn mid-century modern design. Of the seven photos that comprise the exhibition, most are culled from a broader project cleverly titled “Mid-Century Modest,” a series that, as quoted from the artist’s website, examines “domestic and public MCM interiors that are somehow in transition.”

The principles of modern design, often distilled into the catchy philosophy-cum-catchphrase “form follows function,” favour utility over ornamentation, promising a clean break from historical baggage. Even as the utopian ambitions of the mid-century modern design movement have waned, it remains a highly sought-after aesthetic. “Built Persuasion” forges a dilemma out of this desire, a paradoxical longing for an aesthetic that ironically staked its ideals on a rejection of nostalgia.

In keeping with modernism’s disdain for embellishment, the photographs are titled with rote, economical precision. York (green carpet) captures what appears to be an empty trade show venue, its elements pared down to near-abstraction: a wide partitioned room, black curtains and a swath of green carpet atop terrazzo flooring. The provisional feel of the space softens its rectilinear rigidity, giving way to a quiet sense of anticipation, as if the surety of “form follows function” begins to falter the moment function becomes a moving target. The curtains, a recurring motif, hint at something more theatrical. This hunch is confirmed in Memorial (curtains), which shows an empty auditorium: built-in fibreglass shell seats, a spotlight grazing the edge of a red curtain and a vacant stage. There’s a Waiting for Godot-esque quality, where nothing happens and everything depends on the expectation that it might. That sense of unfulfilled suspension runs through “Built Persuasion,” lending the exhibition a tragicomic quality driven not by dramatic action but by the quiet absurdity of waiting for a future that never arrives.

A similar atmosphere of anticlimax is detectable in Main (eames), which depicts a fluorescently lit cafeteria scene, a pair of Eames shell chairs flanking an unremarkable laminate table. Once an emblem of democratic design, the Eames chair has since morphed into a cultish status symbol. Today, ersatz replicas flood Airbnbs and co-working spaces, their ubiquity gradually chipping away at the aura of the originals. Their presence in this cafeteria feels incidental—a relic of their era rather than a curated design choice. While the mise en scène registers as somewhat bleak, there’s something subtly redeeming in the fact that the chairs have simply been left to age, as though their immunity to aestheticization signals a sly resistance to cultural oversaturation.

Eschewing the boosterism of modernist architectural photographers such as Julius Shulman, “Built Persuasion” operates with a distinct sensibility. Whereas Shulman’s photos are aspirationally shot, void of any lived-in quality or flaw, “Built Persuasion”’s greatest asset is its veritable pathos. The sole photo of a private residence, which operates on a more intimate scale than the rest of the show, underscores this psychological complex. Titled Queenston (half mirror), the photo captures a corner of a vacant house: book-matched wood panelling, a mirror reflecting matching cabinetry and faint outlines where picture frames once hung. A quiet malaise settles over the image, shaped by the decline of the middle class that this home was built to accommodate. You can imagine it as a realtor’s photo: clean, unpeopled and ready for purchase, making it hard not to view the space through the lens of appraisal. That emotional range, between aspiration and melancholy, echoes across the show, cutting against the cool, rational impulse of the original design ethos.

If modernism sought a future premised on clarity and progress, “Built Persuasion” captures the long hangover of that vision. Both photography and architecture fix time in space, making them enduring vehicles through which the past persists in the present. Stinner-Kun leverages this shared quality to reveal how our failure to imagine a viable future has bred nostalgia for a future-oriented past. Theorist Mark Fisher called this the “slow cancellation of the future,” a diagnosis that resonates in Tomorrowland (café) and Tomorrowland (exit), a pair of photographs hung on the gallery’s lower level. Taken at Tomorrowland, Disneyland’s futurist Googie-style pavilion built in 1955, these images diverge from the understated, shabby-chic look that manifests in the rest of “Built Persuasion.” What once embodied an ambitious vision of the future now feels quaintly anachronistic. The aesthetic’s techno-utopian thrust reads as campy, even quixotic, perhaps because it failed to anticipate the more sobering legacies of technological progress, like burnout, social isolation and surveillance, to name a few.

In light of this disillusionment, the show’s most enigmatic piece, Hollywood Studios (pipes), lands as a subtle and appropriately droll punchline. A row of exposed exterior pipes runs beneath a painted mural of a horizon, convincing enough that I had to look twice. Gone are Stinner- Kun’s usual architectonic signatures: no curtains, no corners, no crisp geometries, no Eames chairs. What remains is a wry reminder that modernism’s future was, in the end, just a facade. And yet, “Built Persuasion” doesn’t dwell in cynicism. It offers a lucid ambivalence—more sympathetic than scathing toward our present predicament: the aftermath of optimism, a future that is no longer a given and the cognitive dissonance that haunts these onceidealistic forms. ❚

“Built Persuasion” was exhibited at the Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practices, Winnipeg, from March 15, 2025, to May 10, 2025.

Madeline Bogoch is a writer and film programmer based in Winnipeg.