Seven years ago, Chris Woods was thinking about car advertising as a possible theme for a new body of work. What interested him, he tells the Straight, was "the dichotomy between what advertisers sell, which is open road, unlimited horizons, the individual conquering nature in their machine, versus the reality of being stuck in traffic, gridlock, isolation".

He was driving home to Chilliwack from Vancouver, on the last day of his 2000 exhibition Dreamland, which looked at consumer culture and corporate branding. "I got rear-ended on the overpass by somebody driving a giant SUV," he recalls. "Inspiration hunted me down on that one."

Woods is acclaimed for photo-realist paintings that combine an examination of popular culture with a religious sense of exaltation, even transcendence. In his allegorical tableaux, displaced spiritual longing informs the everyday world of shopping malls, fast-food restaurants, billboards, Coke machines, and now car culture.

In his back-yard studio, Woods is working on the last of his most recent series of works, The Magic Hour–Part Two. (An exhibition of these paintings opens today [April 5] at the Diane Farris Gallery and runs to April 28.) Part One, which he showed in June 2004, addressed the "dark side" of the automobile equation.

The new work articulates the freedom and power of the advertising promise, although there's still a dangerous current tugging beneath the smooth, shiny surface of things. Figures wield swords, repel speeding bullets, encounter strange forms hovering over the Mojave Desert (a UFO, perhaps?), or stand tied and blindfolded as if awaiting execution by firing squad.

Allusions range beyond car ads to Daffy Duck, Conan the Barbarian, atomic test sites, Europe's genocidal conquest of the Americas, gun culture, and an 18th-century painting by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo of St. James smiting the Moors. In Cortez, for example, a kneeling man and a standing woman enact an ambiguous drama beside a stopped car. She holds a sword to the back of his neck, and it's difficult to know whether a knighting or a beheading is about to take place.

Many of the figures and cars in the new paintings are posed against backdrops of the American Southwest as seen from the fabled Route 66–sagebrush desert stretching away to distant mountains, cloudless blue sky overhead. In 2005, Woods and his wife travelled part of that highway, between Seligman, Arizona, and Los Angeles, fulfilling the ultimate road-trip dream. "It was like going to Mecca for cars," he says. "On Route 66, you still get that sense of the car as epicentre of popular culture–motels, roadside restaurants, tourist traps."

Other scenarios are enacted in front of local landmarks, such as GM Place. "I was going to try to use advertising as backgrounds," Woods explains, "but for whatever reason, I couldn't quite shoehorn my ideas into the ads I found in magazines. So I ended up shooting a lot of my own background shots." Almost all are set at the time ad photographers call the "magic hour", just after sunset, when a beatific light settles on the landscape.

As has been true since the beginning of Woods's career, his carefully composed tableaux are peopled by his friends and family. Their unassuming appearance and their familiarity to the artist enhance the sense of the local intersecting with the global. "It's where the individual meets the mass-produced–that's what I do," says Woods. "I'm always interested in the notion that I can go anywhere in North America and talk to people about the same movies or television shows or music.…In a weird way, pop culture unites us, however you want to look at that, for good or for bad."

Going anywhere in North America could involve the car, of course. "It's a tool like anything else," Woods says. "It's really up to us whether we conquer the earth and destroy it or whether we use it to pave the way for liberty."

Currents of danger and heroism
mix in hyperreal, ad-like works
such as Cortez