SCOTT MCFARLAND: "Winter Retreating Spring Offence" Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver,. March 29 to May 5, 2012

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Courtesy of Scott McFarland and Monte Clark Gallery Vancouver / Toronto

Scott McFarland, “Corner of the Courageous, Repatriation Ceremony for Private Tyler William Todd, Grenville St., Toronto, Ontario, April 14, 2010”

Scott McFarland, “Corner of the Courageous, Repatriation Ceremony for Private Tyler William Todd, Grenville St., Toronto, Ontario, April 14, 2010”, 2011, Inkjet type print, 59.5" x 165"

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Scott McFarland, “Cheltenham Badlands, Olde Base Line Rd. Caledon”

Scott McFarland, “Cheltenham Badlands, Olde Base Line Rd. Caledon”, 2011, inkjet print, 165" by 60".

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Courtesy of Scott McFarland and Monte Clark Gallery Vancouver / Toronto

Scott McFarland, “Corner of the Courageous, Repatriation Ceremony for Private Tyler William Todd, Grenville St., Toronto, Ontario, April 14, 2010”

Scott McFarland, “Corner of the Courageous, Repatriation Ceremony for Private Tyler William Todd, Grenville St., Toronto, Ontario, April 14, 2010”, 2011, Inkjet type print, 59.5" x 165"

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Scott McFarland: Winter Retreating Spring Offence

Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, BC.

March 29 to May 5, 2012

By Michael Harris

When a Canadian soldier dies in Afghanistan, his or her body (if there is a body left) is repatriated at a ceremony on Toronto’s Grenville Street. A mixed lineup of militia, firefighters, and onlookers salutes the fallen soldier’s return. This stands in marked contrast to the American practice, which hides or hushes the return of its dead soldiers. American gallery-goers, then, were especially moved to discover the Canadian custom in new work by Toronto photographer Scott McFarland. 

On one wall of the Monte Clark Gallery, an enormous inkjet print with the onerous title “Corner of the Courageous, Repatriation Ceremony for Private Tyler William Todd, Grenville St., Toronto, Ontario, April 14^th 2010” - spans 165 inches in length and 60 inches in height. It shows, as the title so diligently outlines, the repatriation of Private Tyler William Todd, which took place April 14, 2010. An unknown number of images have been stitched together to create McFarland’s sweeping depiction of the open-air assembly. We see the askew stares of saluting officials, studying various points of interest invisible to the viewer - Private Todd’s body is out of frame, and en route. The stitched shots produce a forced, wide-angle vista and an awkward perspective, a sense of slight wrong-ness or tension. (The subject itself is, of course, a disruption of ordinary life on a city street.) And yet the human eye does not immediately decipher what has gone wrong with the world.

Perhaps calling McFarland a photographer at all is to miss the point. It would be more appropriate to say he paints with light after gathering a wealth of samples from particular sites. The word “photography” is still conflated with notions of capturing singular moments and McFarland is interested in confounding that assumption. By inviting the eye to embrace multiple perspectives and “shots” at once, his work bends time and space to give us comprehensive, impossible visions. Yet the finished pieces are not demanding in the same way a cubist painting might be as there is nothing illegible. Or, at least nothing immediately so. Rather, McFarland’s artworks - like the history paintings they are in league with - each have an insidious problem, something viral and quiet that will only disrupt a patient viewer.

The exhibit’s title - “Winter Retreating Spring Offence” - makes reference to the Taliban’s springtime attacks in Afghanistan but also, more literally, to the changing of seasons. On the wall facing the repatriation image, hangs an equally large, idealized inkjet landscape, titled “Cheltenham Badlands” that transforms from spring to winter as the eye scans left to right. Again, the wrongness, the un-reality of the finished vista is at once apparent and unnoticed. Arcadian forests, happy light and mild snow trip easily into each other. There is a subversive beauty to the scene which lends a sense of rightness despite the fabrication. Over the springtime forests at the image’s left hangs a low, hazy, winter sun.

McFarland’s pairing of these two grand images (amongst a few smaller studies) lends a political charge to his nature scene (withered farmland) and universality to his repatriation ceremony (the tides of life and death). Neither of the grand works can be adequately described by listing their technical wonders, though. They form cohesive wholes, pictorially and emotively, so that the viewer can perceive some larger truth than our limited perceptions normally allow. Like all the greatest photographs (and all the greatest paintings) they race back and forth between a world full of hard, implacable things and our subjective, foolish, vision.