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October 16, 2009
Disappearing communities
Danny Singer examines the small-town theatre that remains.
DION KLINER
Unless you're already living in one, the word "hamlet" more likely brings Shakespeare's prince to mind than a small town. And the tragedy of loss that Hamlet endures would be familiar to any of the small, disappearing communities of Canada and the United States that Vancouver artist Danny Singer has been documenting in photographs since 1999. This makes the name of his new exhibit, Hamlet, all the more appropriate.
Before anything else, the most noticeable thing about Singer's pictures is their long, attenuated formats. It emphasizes the horizontality of the subjects and the dead-flat landscapes in which they're frequently found. The format is also a reflection of the pattern of the lives lived along the lines of main streets, conveying the "broader goal of describing the linear aspect of the life of the village or hamlet," according to Mark Reddekopp of Gallery Jones. "Everything occurs on Main Street or on Railway Avenue. The existence of entire communities for decades tracked along this line; a town hall beside a small grocery store beside a church beside a hotel containing a bar beside an insurance agent beside a post office beside a cafΘ and so on." Even in a squat rectangular picture like "Bassano Blue Sky," one is held by the horizontal. Singer has piled up the weight of an impossibly blue sky on top of a ribbon of buildings, flattening them to the bottom edge.
It's the atmosphere of the pictures that stands out next, still and perfect, even when peopled, as if these scenes would remain unchanged forever. Yet at the same time, they contain a feeling of imminence, the potential that anything could happen within them, but perpetually in suspension, always just before anything actually does happen. It's something deliberate and unnatural. In many ways Singer's pictures are like George Seurat's large painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" or the lyric description from Stephen Sondheim's play Sunday in the Park with George: "Order. Design. Composition. Tone. Form. Symmetry. Balance. Color and light. There's only color and light."
How deliberate are Singer's compositions? Those clouds in "Wiseton (Summer)," how perfect! The way they move up from right to left and subtly mimic the outline of branches on the right hand side of the second tree from the left. Each tree, each building of the middle ground, distinct and individualized, but all working together in rhythm. Look especially at the central tree, how square it is and its relation to the building on its left, how closely it approximates the proportions. Traditionally art falls between the poles of "art as a window which shows the world" and "art as a metaphor." Where do Singer's pictures fall?
As much as they initially look to be unadulterated documents of places, there is something naggingly unreal about the photographs. Singer seems to back up to an impossible distance from his subjects to get his compositions, as if there were no limit, no other buildings in which to back into. Yet unless it's always a field on the other side of the streets in the foreground, there must be something. And sure enough, in the shadows that come from over his head in pictures like "Ceylon" and "Sintaluta" we see the shapes of buildings behind him.
Using a wide-angle lens and seamless digital joinery of 80 to 150 individual photographs, Singer composes a single ideal representation of each scene he presents. He has created an imaginary "fourth wall" akin to cinema and theatre, whereby the audience sits in the privileged position of being able to see the entirety of reality without regard to the limitations imposed by reality like physical barriers, the rules of perspective, the laws of physics, time or place. All are superseded here. Like the makers of Hebrew National hot dogs, Singer answers to a higher authority. His is art. Through his skill and imagination, reality composes itself to conform, not only to Singer's vision, but to our own vision of the perfect small-town main street.
Nowadays, small towns are foreign to many, even though, if one goes back a generation or two, it was from places like these, or the villages and shtetls of eastern Europe, that most families came. If we're of a certain place and age, we know their characters. They're the ones of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon and Sholem Aleichem's Boyberik, which became Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof. Unfortunately, as perfect as Singer makes things look, characters and location share a fate that is too often a tragic drama. If not for Singer's striking, puzzling and melancholic panoramas of their dwindling streets they would remain unknown and be lost.
Hamlet is Vancouver's first opportunity in five years to see Singer's work in a private gallery. The exhibition continues at Gallery Jones until Oct. 31. For more information, visit galleryjones.com.
Dion Kliner is a sculptor and freelance writer living in Vancouver. Contact him at [email protected].
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