Chilliwack, B.C. -- Cruising through the maze of bright and ugly chain stores that define downtown Chilliwack BC, artist Chris Woods seems in his element. "I find the modern urban landscape fascinating," he says, "and consumerism is what shapes it." It's the kind of aphorism that's equally handy for hell-raising activists and buttoned-down marketers. For Woods recognizes a truth that few aesthetes would like to admit: for better or worse, franchise culture is the de facto culture of our times.

After depicting the garish architecture of the fast-food industry in his previous set of paintings, Woods is now turning his attention to the formidable subject of advertising. Dreamland, his new show that opened yesterday at Vancouver's Diane Farris Gallery, will feature memorable images of average Joes and Josephines paying all sorts of twisted homages to The Gap -- which he calls "the McDonald's of clothing stores" -- Coca-Cola and other mainstays of mainstream consumption.

Working out of his modest Chilliwack studio, located about 75 kilometres up the Fraser River from central Vancouver, Woods is making a name for himself by making consumer culture his specialty. Using his buddies as models, Woods sets up slyly irreverent photographs that reflect our deference to McDonald's Golden Arches and other franchise icons, projects the images onto canvas and then paints, using the photos as guides. The eerily realistic images that result evoke wartime propaganda graphics, with corporate logos in place of nationalist slogans.

It's the kind of obsessive celebration/denunciation that's exemplified in Robert Venturi's book Learning from Las Vegas, published in 1972. Woods finds that the American architect's treatise jibed with his own views on the marvels of mall culture: As Venturi himself wrote in a later book, it hailed "the forgotten symbolism of architectural form forgotten because current Modern design, then and now, denied architecture's symbolic content and emphasized abstract form; and of course good taste dictated that you don't like signs, especially big commercial ones." Signs of all sorts are crowding out the historic generators of urban form -- trees, buildings, and so forth.

Closer to home, a crop of younger writers have taken on consumer culture as a kind of subspecialty and, for them, Woods is a kind of postmodernist Norman Rockwell, the perfect illustrator for their manifestos. (Woods, in fact, confesses to being "a closet Rockwell fan.") His portraits of catatonic fast-food employees swearing oaths over company logos have found a home in magazines like Harper's and Adbusters. They also feature in Hal Niedzviecki's We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Re-Invention of Mass Culture and in Naomi Klein's No Logo, two recently published books on mall culture. "I have mixed feelings about it being used in this way," shrugs Woods. "I don't have any aspirations to be a revolutionary. None whatsoever."

Klein calls his work "critical but not revolutionary. It gets to the heart of the relationship that everyone in this generation has with brands -- that they play a religious role in their lives."

Niedzviecki, who had the conventional teenage apprenticeship at Burger King, sees Woods's idealized fast-food workers as "taking up a heroic position within the pop continuum. It makes us think that they are important people, which of course they're not."

Going beyond the dubious career promise of the fast-food environment, Woods' new Gap and Calvin Klein series seems to be about our desire to reimagine what we look like rather than what we do. (Can you imagine anyone from the Gap ads doing anything for a living?) A triptych called Saffire features a youngish couple (the models were Woods and his wife) warming their hands before a fire roaring from a Gap bag, flanked by desolate-looking couples on a tile floor, their heads pillowed by -- naturally -- Gap bags. In Lighthouse One, an unremarkable and bored-looking couple sit in a bus shelter, oblivious to their precise reproduction in the shelter's Gap poster.

If the bulk of his paintings cruelly remind us just how unGappish our physiques really are, his self-portraits are a bit more -- let's call it self-indulgent. Christopher's Masterpiece features a multiple self-portrait of Woods as a Vanity Fair cover boy, flanked by self-portraits in ersatz Gap and Calvin Klein ads, mop of hair sloping raffishly over a chiselled face. His own visage significantly more handsome (in that shallow Gappish way, of course) than it is in real life. When he uses his friends as models, by contrast, he depicts them in all their glorious averageness -- biggish of nose, shy of cheekbone and sporting a hint of a double chin. Which reminds us of an irksome side-effect of advertising: It makes everyone around us look rather homely, while convincing us that we're better-looking than we really are.

To be sure, Woods, a balding and bespectacled 30-year-old, is far from a dewy-eyed Gap kid. Born in Newcastle, N.B., he moved with his family to Chilliwack as a child and has never thought seriously of moving anywhere else. He took art courses at Fraser Valley College but never completed his diploma, finding the instructors' tastes too stodgy. They refused to let him exhibit a series of his paintings at a school show, since he had worked from photographs.

Author Douglas Coupland calls his paintings "the modern equivalent of stained glass windows." He probably received the plum commission to paint the Stations of the Cross, a series of 14 paintings for a Vancouver Anglican church, "because the church folk knew from the get-go he had this bent in his work," adds Coupland. "It's also fascinating that he should be doing the sort of work he's doing at the same point and place in history -- Vancouver, 2000 -- where the collision of the self and the corporate has never been so overtly and hotly debated."

And yet Woods is trying to do something that would have been irreverent a couple of decades ago, but is now oxymoronic, or even tautological. He is generating commentary on advertising, just as advertising itself has been turning in on itself, becoming self-parodying or even antimedia, as in, for instance, Special K's antidiet campaign.

When artists take on advertising, the ads usually co-opt them, in the same way that homeowners wielding a gun against intruders usually get the weapon turned back on themselves.

Just as Nirvana's anticonsumer grinder Smells Like Teen Spirit did more for that deodorant's brand-recognition than anything its corporate parent could have dreamed up, Woods's paintings seems to be a matter of pride to his subjects. When we stroll into the neighbourhood Dairy Queen, the one depicted in his sardonic 1997 series Royal Treats, he gets a warm and hearty "Hi, Chris!" from the floor manager and smiles all around, as befitting the company's unofficial portraitist.

Actually, he's more like the quintessential Canadian -- spectacularly uncorporate, with a blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt, beige Bermuda shorts and rust-brown sneakers. The shirts are from Zellers; the sneakers are recent acquisitions from Foot Locker -- "my nod to the conglomerates," he says. "I'm not a hermit who never eats at McDonald's or shops at The Gap. But when I'm doing it, I'm thinking about the fact that I'm buying from a megaconglomerate."

He pauses, perhaps reflecting on the fact that what he just said won't cut much ice with the anticorporate anarchists.

"If I know I'm a slave," he adds quietly, "then it's okay."

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