Chris Woods: Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms

At Gallery Jones until November 28

Chris Woods has staked a distinctive claim at the intersection of photo-realist painting and contemporary life. Through his deftly executed tableaux, using his friends as models and quoting images and techniques from art history and contemporary advertising, the Chilliwack-based artist shines a sardonic light on consumer culture and the spiritual void at the core of North American existence. Shopping malls, fast-food outlets, billboards, and car culture have all passed through his repertoire. His latest body of work, which includes an innovative series of silkscreen prints, is explicitly titled Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms.

Posed against the high desert landscapes of the American Southwest, his models smoke Camels and Marlboros, hold bottles of Budweiser and Jack Daniel’s to their lips, and brandish shiny handguns, some of them big enough to fell a moose. Again employing the seductive strategies of advertising, with visual references to historical religious and portrait paintings, Woods focuses our eyes and minds on the ways popular culture creates a sexy aura around objects and substances that sicken, wound, and kill.

Woods also cites the United States government agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, that exists to oversee these potentially deadly but entirely legal commodities. In Desert Eagle, a slender, black-haired woman, wearing a T-shirt that reads “ATF US Special Agent” and toting cig, booze, and gun, is fetishistically strapped with holsters and ammunition belts. A gold ring, emanating rays of brilliant light, hovers above her like a halo. In her white-sand desert (visually alluring but hardly sustaining of life), she’s a goddess of death and destruction under the guise of a guardian angel. It is a significant and painful coincidence that on the day of Woods’s exhibition opening, an American army psychiatrist allegedly murdered 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas—using his own handguns.

Unusually, Woods has wrapped a thin black line around his human subjects. This effect snaps the figures out of their landscape grounds and bestows on them the pop-culture unreality of cardboard cutouts in a movie-theatre lobby. Woods, who neither smokes, drinks, nor shoots, also stands apart from the world he depicts. Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms is as beautifully conceived and executed as any work he’s ever produced.