Christos Dikeakos: Trouble in Paradise
A Capture Photography Festival presentation. At the West Vancouver Museum until June 13

Colin Smith: Inside Out
A Capture Photography Festival presentation. At the Winsor Gallery until May 2

You might wonder what Christos Dikeakos’s documentary-style photographs of orchards in the Okanagan Valley have in common with Colin Smith’s camera obscura images of the interior of a camping trailer in southern Alberta. In many ways, however, the similarities are striking.

Although it’s not the stated purpose of either, the way both artists use photography alerts us to the cultural construction of nature, a persistent theme among postmodernists. Their specific focus and techniques may differ, but Smith and Dikeakos both ask us to consider how we locate ourselves within landscape, how we alter or occupy it to serve our needs.

The fact that the landscape subject—its changing face and overlaid histories—continues to compel artists after so many centuries is proof of its visual and philosophical richness.

Although based in Vancouver, Dikeakos and his wife acquired an old apple orchard near Naramata some 15 years ago. Working hard to sustain it stimulated the artist’s interest in what he observed happening around the property—the decline of apple-growing in an area once famous for it. In the Okanagan, apple orchards are being displaced by a rapidly expanding viniculture (not to mention population growth and increased urbanization).

In Trouble in Paradise, at the West Vancouver Museum, Dikeakos’s ink-jet prints invoke the apple’s enduring symbolism in art, folklore, and enterprise, from the Garden of Eden through Johnny Appleseed and forward to a famous species of computer. At the same time, they ask us to consider economic, political, and environmental issues surrounding apple orcharding in our province.

On view are a number of romantic images of apples, in autumnal abundance in well-tended orchards or in individual close-ups, capped with snow, gilded with sunlight, or washed with rain. Mounted among these more lyrical photos, however, are shots of unpicked apples, hanging on neglected trees or strewn hopelessly around them, apparently not worth the cost of harvesting. There is also a wintry shot of a razed orchard, the middle ground filled with heaps of severed trunks and branches, the foreground a desolate passage of denuded earth. Here, the background reveals the orchard’s natural setting, the arid hills and low mountains against which this drama of land use is being played out.

Still, a couple of shots suggest the fruit’s endurance, not only as a beloved food but also as a metaphor for our relationship with the natural world. Especially potent is a photo of a single, deep-red apple, growing on a slender branch that has sprouted upward from a fallen tree. You can almost hear this remnant of a tree admonishing us, demanding that we be more respectful of our environment, whether cultivated or not.

In his Winsor Gallery exhibition, Inside Out, Smith uses camera obscura techniques to transform individual interior spaces—most notably, hotel rooms and a Boler camping trailer—with upside-down projections of the surrounding environment. In the Boler series, particularly, the Calgary-based photographer employs double exposures to contrast the dreamy, diffused, inverted image, which enters the darkened interior through a pinhole-size aperture, with highly focused photos of the surrounding landscape, seen right side up through the trailer’s big windows. In both the Boler and hotel series, the contrast between distinct ways of framing “nature” provokes us to think, again, about how we construct an idea of landscape, especially within the context of travel and tourism.

Mountains, lakes, glaciers, and stands of slender poplars play across the trailer’s built-in furniture and occasional markers of travel, such as maps, guidebooks, and souvenir mugs. One of Smith’s most telling images, however—and one that creates a thematic link with Dikeakos’s project—is Nanton Boler. Here, an old grain elevator is projected upside down and faintly across the trailer’s interior, while through the windows we see fields of yellow canola—and another economy of displacement suggests itself. The camera obscura images make a nifty metaphor for memory and nostalgia—a fond recollection of what landscape once was and never will be again.