HO
A video presentation of Toni Hafkenscheid's photographs runs at the Montréal Via Rail Train Station.
Opening on Thursday, September 5 at 5 p.m.
The exhibition runs from September 5 to October 5, 2002.
For several years, Toni Hafkenscheid's work has examined artifice as a device for blurring the limits between reality and fiction. The exhibition HO - a name used for the scale of model train sets - brings together his most recent photographs.
In his previous work, Toni Hafkenscheid developed dramatically charged scenes within domestic, everyday settings. For one of his series, the subjects photographed in their dwellings performed theatrical, domestic dramas. In another series, the artist "documented" moments before and after a suicide - also staged.
With HO, Hafkenscheid pursues in a different way, his marked interest in lure and device. Taken across North America, his recent images propose a singular perspective on ordinary landscapes, urban territory, suburbs and the grandiloquent Northern woods. Although they are taken from real life, the photographs included in HO have the inherent quality of a mise-en-scène, the static, perfect, even idealised state of models and miniatures. Isolated by out-of-focus foregrounds and backgrounds, neat houses, deserted streets, shops and trains breaking through majestic landscapes make the dark side of things invisible. Yet, everything in these idealised images of the world, in these microcosms, seems high-strung, ready to burst should someone make an attempt at individual affirmation.
Meticulously circumscribed, the coloured scenes of HO recall a certain American dream, an idealised view of an immediate future typical of the 1950s.
In conjunction with the exhibition HO, Dazibao presents a video projection of Toni Hafkenscheid's work at the Montreal VIA Rail train station from September 5 to October 5, 2002. Located at 895 de la Gauchetière West, (Metro Bonaventure). Open daily from 6:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.