Shopping is my religion, chanted a popular 1990s T-shirt. And the level of indoctrination has been growing steadily worse ever since. Chilliwack artist Chris Woods holds a fitting-room mirror up to the shallow love affair -- that mistakes an excursion to the Gap as a meaningful pilgrimage -- in a show of new works, Dreamland.

Woods looks upon consumer culture as a kind of bible. In recent years, he showed us kids hanging out at the Dairy Queen dipping french fries into pools of hand-held ketchup that looked just like Jesus' stigmata and counter workers at fast-food restaurants who seemed like figures from The Last Supper.

Now, in Dreamland, opening this week at Diane Farris Gallery, Woods has turned his high-beams on the hollow glamour of big-brand merchandising. Shopping is still a religion, as he shows in a monumental triptych altar that opens to show pseudo-religious figures of teenagers sleeping on Gap shopping bags or warming their hands on the sacred flame of a Gap bag on fire.

A pair of intensely coloured paintings shows young suburbanites hunkered down at a bus stop or buying cola from a machine, oblivious to the fact that their own images are staring down at them, glamorously arrayed across the bus shelter and the front of the pop machine. Still another image, The Fourth of July, shows two Canadian mall rats, slumped down at the foot of a Ralph Lauren ad, waving trademark flags in a denatured counterfeit of real patriotism. "By shifting my focus from the world of fast food to the broader world of advertising and corporate branding, I hope to shed new light on the strange media-machine that influences all our lives," writes Woods in his artist's statement.

Two works are particularly oriented toward the media. The first is a free-standing piece in the shape of an open book on which Woods has painted himself into magazine covers (a breathy Vanity Fair knock off -- "Christopher's Masterpiece: Titanic star Christopher Woods is quite simply the World's biggest heartthrob) and high-fashion ads. The second is a long two-panel portrait of a friend, stretched out as if he were the image in the Shroud of Turin, floating above carefully reproduced fashion magazines and their pop-tart covergirls.

The works in Dreamland feature saturated colours and Woods' realistic style. They also contain portraits of Woods' circle of friends, a 20-something set of people whose gently advancing years have been chronicled over time in Woods' work.

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