William Eakin

At a time when much of visual art seems fascinated with appropriating or referencing its own history and the dominant subject of so much in all media is the medium itself, William Eakin is one of a relatively small number who have managed to retain a clear sense of purpose in pursuing their own vision. Given the scale of art-world competition and image-saturated consumers expecting the evermore dramatic, spectacular and big, for someone like Eakin, whose work depends upon none of these, such resistance is admirable and in the field of his nominal practice, photography, it is also especially rare. While almost everything has been touched by the combined effects of the communications and digital revolutions of the past couple of decades, in the world of the high arts it is undoubtedly photography that has felt the greatest impact. First came the frontal onslaught of digital technology that utterly transformed the means by which photographs are created and then, just as artist photographers were coming to terms with that, along came camera-equipped smartphones, Facebook, Flickr and Instagram flooding the ether with a seemingly endless supply of photographs, most anonymous, almost all freely available to view and sometimes, to download and print as well. For photographers with heavy investments of either ego, capital or both, the ease with which strikingly good, freely available images can be found has made viewing internet photography sites a thoroughly depressing exercise and has led many to counter with a mannered overindulgence in technique and overstatement.

None of which, I’m pleased to say, is evidenced in “Time,” Eakin’s recent exhibition at Winnipeg’s Actual gallery. There are just 11 works in the show, only one of which is especially large, a wall-filling installation comprised of a hundred framed, equal-sized variations of a single image. All pieces present as a handless watch or clock dial, a numerically marked, circular form set against a featureless, usually black background. Each watch face is distressed, discoloured and seemingly scarred with chips and scratches. In some, the numbering of the hours is reversed.

At the front of the gallery are two pieces that evoke the sun and the moon. Across the floor, facing them, is an image of what appears to be an early 18th-century clock face featuring a crude, folk art painting depicting Adam, Eve and a snake coiled around a fruit tree. On the side walls are two commemorative baseball watch faces celebrating the accomplishments of home-run hitters, three others that appear to be have been manufactured in Soviet-era Russia, another inscribed with the words I AM A CAMPER above an image of a child sitting beside a tent at night, and one—the one on which the numbering runs backwards and variants of which make up the hundred-image piece—that displays what seems to be a huge fingerprint.

While the range of thematic elements that appears in such a small collection sharing a single, formal construct might at first seem puzzling, as I moved back and forth between works, I regarded both the conceptual rigour and the deftness with which Eakin has handled the contrapuntal relationships among them. Besides the form, the other consistency in the images is the centred, usually black, circular vacancy through which the time-measuring mechanism would once have protruded, giving the appearance of an oculus punctured by a pupil-like, black hole. The allusions and their interplay are several, diverse and complex. As well as the obvious relationship between sight and photography, more subtly there is the sense of separation and isolation that comes from looking deeply into another’s eyes and reorganizing the impossibility of ever truly knowing them. On a grand scale, it is the reference to the unfathomable vastness and mystery of the universe and most specifically, the black hole phenomenon from within which light may not escape and time may be reversed.

Time has been a leitmotif threaded throughout almost all of Eakin’s work, making this present show both a logical extension and an exceedingly refined summation of his career to date. For years now he has devoted himself to rescuing, and through his photographs, making iconic, the odd representations of mid-20th century North American culture: bottle caps, amateur sports trophies and discarded Polaroids, and in the show “Have a Nice Day,” the 1950s fascination with the possibility of flying saucers and alien visitors. It is for these he is likely best known, although there have certainly been other equally significant bodies of work: the images of disposable Taiwanese folk art constructions for example, the pictures of deteriorating, enamelled grave portraits and from 30 years ago, his photographs of plants in his father’s garden.

It would be easy to see this interest in such subjects as no more than Eakin’s response to one element of the prevailing discourse of his youth—the banal as photography’s natural domain being all the rage in the 1970s when he was completing his training. Eakin, however, had responded to this material much later than many and having done so, has taken it far beyond mere celebration, extending the metaphoric potentials of the experience of ordinary things into the realm of metaphysics, something that in current Western visual art has been rather out of fashion. It is part of why I find much of Eakin’s work unsettles me; the means may seem deceptively simple but, as is so evident in the present show, his concerns are as much philosophical as they are artistic.

Eakin’s projects have always hinted at an Aristotelian purpose and in “Time” he moves even further in that direction, offering something that is gently rhetorical without being didactic. The work exudes a sense of pathos—both in the original Greek and in the contemporary, more nuanced sense of a delicate balance of a satisfying, even joyful sadness—one informed by his own ethos through the particular logos of photography. ❚

“Time” was exhibited at Actual, Winnipeg, from October 9 to November 8, 2014.

Richard Holden is a photographer and writer. He lives in Fort Garry, Manitoba.