Vie DES arts
Stories From the Bridle Path
John K Grande
Ruins can evoke a great number of emotions. They captured the Romantic poets and painters interest from Byron to Flaxman to Turner to David and Fuseli. It brought many of them to Rome to paint and write on the ruins firsthand. For those artists and writers the attraction was with a vanished history, some culture in the past were fragments, decayed buildings, and monuments all inspired the imagination. What attracted them in part was the notion of sublime past (that perhaps never truly existed as the Romantics saw it). We now live in a culture where ruins can be manufactured, and structures are conceived as temporary. Ephemera and pop culture drive us to accept different aesthetic prospects, formatted but not necessarily about grandeur or idealization. Reality is edited, manipulated, transformed, and even ruins acquire a different meaning and sensibility. For his latest series of photos, some C Prints and others archival ink jet printed, Scott Johnston has produced a series titled Stories from the Bridle Path that capture modern-day ruins, an unusual subject seen from the photographer voyeur’s point of view.
Situated in a wealthy sector of Toronto, the Bridle Path is home to some very upscale neglected buildings and modernist mansions. Abandoned by their owners for unknown reasons, they have a haunted quality, as if we feel the spirits of the people who once lived there. In this museum of memories the traces and details are all that remain. The specific rooms are all part of the scenario. Johnston captures these with an intrepid eye from seemingly haphazard points of view. The building, rooms-inside or outside-are stale constructs, abandoned shells whose crumbling structures were once grandiose and opulent in a cheap upscale way. Why were they abandoned? Who lived there? Such questions remain unanswered…What Johnston has brought into focus for this Engine Gallery show (part of Toronto’s Contact photography festival) are images that evidence a certain social and human neglect, something we cannot imagine possible in such a wealthy environs. As such, these photos are succinct paraphrasing of social and human neglect, and are about the neglect that so often accompanies the trappings of wealth-as if by accident. These photos objectify, are morose, scenographic icons of abandonment.
Like instant ruins, or an archaeology of the present, Johnston draws in upon these places. Traces of previous residents’ personas remains in the decaying details… We see a child’s painted mural and roughly painted words at the bottom of a derelict swimming pool in the C-Print Dream Dare Daze (2004). You Win (2004) captures a close up of a tennis court net, half of the net is down. Whether a wrecked deck chair or wallpaper remnants, all past life eventually peels away in these photos, is effectively reclaimed by nature. As the past wears thin, fades, disintegrates, original meanings evaporate into thin air. The changes these photos of built scenarios’ record are a decontructivist’s dream! We look through a broken window into the living room whose mahogany wall unit is still set into the wall. Something remains. Other photos capture other eery details; expensive tiling lifting up from a kitchen floor, the result of an absence of heat and a reminder of Canada’s extreme winter weather conditions. Other photos have paint peeling, weathered walls, leaves and scattered detritus. Light dark contrasts further the feeling that these are hidden spaces, mostly not entered into by strangers.
Scott Johnston’s photos are notably post Modern in that he does not heavily edit, or intrude into the way a photo is composed. Instead these photo images are fleeting, almost votive in their haphazard approach to the abandon. Johnston’s approach to photography is passive, environmental and phenomenological, as if these found props of past life were assemblages. Forlorn, weathered, withering, even faded in their coloration, these photos are testaments to neglect. And most of this is simply the result of the passage of time. Incongruous and real!
