Advertising imagery, auto culture, and activism rev up Chris Woods's photorealistic canvases at the Diane Farris Gallery until June 26

Chris Woods has established a reputation as a spokesperson for his generation, and not just because he uses friends as his models, painting them in recognizable suburban settings such as malls and fast-food restaurants. Although he has not neglected his technique, which is masterly, the 34-year-old artist is more concerned with his message, which has to do with the way that advertising has colonized the popular imagination, and the way that the culture of consumption has become the only culture available to vast numbers of North Americans. Like his peers Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis, Woods is crafting accessible critiques of a situation he considers intolerable, but rather than theorize about the failings of our society, he's painting the fallout from those failings, then asking his viewers to think about what they see.

In many ways, Chilliwack-based Woods is the model of the artist as activist, a serious populist with a point to make and the ability to make it on a number of different levels. And one of those levels is the ironic: when he paints himself and a friend hunkered down on the tiled floor of a suburban mall with a road map and a steering wheel, confusion furrowing their brows and a giant poster for a Toyota SUV in the background, he's pointing out the gulf between desire and actuality. In their dreams, they should be flying down the open road; in reality, they ain't going nowhere.

But there are ironies around Woods's own work and artistic stature that are threatening to swamp his project, and they're particularly evident in the new paintings that make up his current show at the Diane Farris Gallery. The six large canvases - including You Are Here, described above - that make up The Magic Hour, Part 1 are striking, but do they grab our attention because of their critique of billboard imagery or because they use the same techniques as billboard art? Is the spectral light that floods the best of these paintings evidence of some supernatural radiance or just a trick of the brush? Can you really question corporate culture when you're making images that sell for between $18,000 and $24,000? (Gallery owner Farris mentioned that one of Woods's fast-food paintings, set in a Subway restaurant, now hangs in the New York City office of the sandwich chain's CEO - an indication, one suspects, of the point at which irony fails to register.)

Then there's the fact that two of the six paintings are markedly less complex and less successful than the others. Five Star Service depicts Woods striking a noble pose, wearing an American military uniform and a chest full of medals that, on closer inspection, are revealed as automobile insignia. President Cadillac shows a well-coiffed young man behind a podium on which the U.S. president's seal of office has been replaced by a badge-like Cadillac emblem. It's never wrong to point out that corporate forces, the military, and political parties exist primarily to safeguard the profits of the rich, but these flat and obvious images don't repay the energy that went into making them.

More entrancing is Archangel, in which two attractive women stride down a road, one holding a torch, the other a rock. Here, the composition asks more of the viewer. We have to check the references: magazine advertising and its mirror image, socialist realism; religious and sporting iconography; movie images of Joan of Arc and other heroines. And we have to ponder what's going on, too. What's with the rock? Is it about to go through the window of that red SUV in the background, or does it just symbolize one tough truck? Can we innocently ooh and aah at the canvas - "that light is luscious" - or are we merely indulging a sexually conditioned response to the cropped T-shirts the women are wearing and the aura of confidence they project?

That's a lot to ask of any viewer, but it's a good sign this painting is doing what it should.

One last irony: for all the effort that has gone into Woods's supersize images, the best thing on display at the Farris gallery is a video about his work, screened on a minuscule portable television placed right by the entranceway. We watch him scouting locales, mixing paint, setting up elaborate tableaux, and talking, with thoughtful eloquence, about how he sees art, advertising, and culture. We're lucky that we can occasionally view his work hanging on local gallery walls, but it's hard not to think about how much luckier we'd be if Woods had a bigger canvas - politics, say - for his insights.

Alexander Varty
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