Anodyne
Sunday, June 11, 2006
 
The Honorable Member for the Opposition

Review from Woo magazine, Summer 2006:

"Pictures 2005-6
Christopher Brayshaw at Granville Street Studio, #205-850 Granville Street

Reviewed by Ryan Aronofsky

Christopher Brayshaw’s biography says he is an art critic, a curator, the co-director of a hip new Main Street gallery, a bookstore owner, and some other things I didn’t bother writing down. He’s also an amateur photographer. Judging by this show, his first, photography is a hobby he practices in and around his other jobs. As a result, none of the pictures on display are particularly strong or memorable.

It’s not that Brayshaw hasn’t thought about what he’s doing, but rather that he’s thought too much. The photos suffer for all this thinking. Some are of abstract shapes – a paint spill on the pavement; a boarded-over window; newspaper boxes – that suggest unearthly or supernatural presences. Brayshaw calls them ‘ghosts.’ Most do look like ghosts, but they also look like the work of local photographers Brayshaw admires and has written about – Jeff Wall, Roy Arden, Adam Harrison, and, in the case of the ‘ghost pictures,’ Evan Lee, for whom Brayshaw recently wrote a long and not particularly memorable essay for a Presentation House Gallery catalog. You expect this kind of lazy emulation-pastiche from entries in the grad show, and not from an ‘independent critic’ who is at least theoretically meant to be able to distinguish between okay and better art.

Besides the ‘ghost pictures,’ there are also some urban landscapes that name-check Walker Evans and Stephen Shore, and a few inexplicably cluttered studies of magnolia trees. These crowded photos seem like attempts to put a whole bunch of ideas (about landscape; about portraiture; about snapshot photography) into play simultaneously, but ultimately fail to resolve any of them.

Most of the pictures aren’t technically embarrassing (with the exception of the magnolias, the photos are competently composed, well-printed, and expensively framed). But it’s Brayshaw’s slavish imitation of the kind of photography he likes that renders his own work of only passing interest."
- posted by cjb @ 10:45 AM


<< Home

Powered by Blogger

.post-title { display: none!important; }