At State Gallery until November 30

Winter, Danny Singer's new exhibition at State Gallery, reveals some intriguing parallels with the Stephen Shore show at Presentation House. In a video work and five panoramic photographs of the main streets of small Saskatchewan towns, the Edmonton-born, Vancouver-based Singer makes use of strategies similar to Shore's, relating especially to photo-conceptualism and the New Topographics. His still images thread long lines of vernacular architecture across the flat Prairie landscape, stitching together social, economic, and geographic complexities, past and present.

Singer's subject matter and subtle use of colour inevitably recall Shore's Main Street, Gull Lake, Saskatchewan, August 18, 1974. The cumulative record of individual structures also evokes Ed Ruscha's landmark 1966 photo book, Every Building on the Sunset Strip. These precedents place Winter in relationship to past and current photo-based art, both local and international. Singer's images are not detached, but lay poetic claim to the landscape. His grandparents, he wrote in an earlier statement, were pioneers in Alberta and Saskatchewan. A strong sense of place finds its way into his photographs.

As with his earlier series of summery small-town streetscapes, Singer has digitally assembled many dozens of individual images into his winter panoramas, broadened the foreground, and eliminated most references to what stands on the opposite side of the road. The exaggerated horizontal format (the ink-jet prints on view are typically about 48 centimetres high and five or six times as wide) demands close viewing, moving from one end of the image to the other. (Singer has likened this process to driving slowly through each town.) Such viewing is rewarded by little symphonies of visual detail: white paint peeling from weathered facades; tire tracks in packed snow; frost on unheated windowpanes; winter grime on cars, vans, and ubiquitous pickup trucks; steeples, flagpoles, street signs, faded advertisements; strings of unlit Christmas lights; pumpjacks and grain silos on the distant horizon.

Part of what Singer is documenting here is the long, white grip of winter on the Great Central Plains and the way Canadian identity is hooked to climate and geography. Part is the cadence of rural architecture within the landscape, and part again is the passing of the small Prairie town. Many of the buildings and businesses depicted are shut down, boarded up, or in states of transition or dereliction. Signage reveals failed attempts to either centralize or diversify. In Singer's lovingly depicted Saskatchewan towns, prospects are as short and uncertain as the vistas are wide and clear.