It was one of those all-too-rare moments of discovery: the mailer arrived from the Monte Clark Gallery for the first-ever Justine Kurland show in Canada. I'd heard of Kurland, and knew she was a New York-based Yalie who was widely praised for her photo-based conceptual work. But I had to admit I'd never actually seen any of it. Then I flipped the card over, and there it was (and is, at right): A procession of young girls making their way across a scrubby dune in the most perfect light and haze you, as a photographer, could ever hope for. In the foreground, the sun is liquid gold, coating the wisps of beach grass, as the girls, almost cast in silhouette, make their way into a glowing, indistinct haze.
It was, and is, mesmerizingly beautiful, and enough to get me through the door. At the show, about a dozen of Kurland's works hang in the large interior gallery. Their presentation is austere: Plain maple frames -- no matting, no glass -- border Kurland's images, which, at about 3' by 5', are neither imposing nor particularly noticeable. In fact, they're a little flat; Kurland's composition is deliberate and, like an obvious forbear in Vancouver artist Jeff Wall, very static. Her colours are often brilliant and hyper-real, and the scenes, while not digitally manipulated, have a strange, unnatural quality to them that both unsettles and, to a lesser degree, confounds.
Kurland takes some pains to make references to history painting in her work -- another Wall technique -- and that's all well and good. But what it isn't particularly, is engaging. There's an obvious dialogue about innocence and nascent sexuality in the images -- the one image set apart from the otherwise nymphs-in-Eden tone of the show is of a couple having rough sex in a burnt-out vehicle under a freeway off-ramp -- but it fails, generally, to compel. Kurland has mastered light, and harnessed it to create tone, both beauty and despair -- a worthy task that precious few photographers ever fully achieve; now she needs to truyl decide what she wants to do with it.
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