Bruce Stewart: Dollarton Pleasure Faire, 1972
At Presentation House Gallery to August 3

In what must be the signal image from Bruce Stewart’s series of black-and-white photographs, “Dollarton Pleasure Faire, 1972”, a young hippie, naked except for a macramé belt slung around her hips, stares across Burrard Inlet at the oil refinery on the opposite shore. Stewart’s telephoto lens compresses the distance between them; the late-summer sun shines with cosmic indifference on her bare flesh and on the smoking chimneys and gleaming towers beyond. In this silent confrontation between counterculture and big business, between the idealistic longing for change and the cynical entrenchment of the status quo, nothing is spoken and yet everything is said.

Remarkable as it is, this is not the image with which Stewart’s exhibition opens. Instead, as you walk into the room in which it is hung, you immediately see a wintry, panoramic photo of the Maplewood Mudflats, taken a year and some months after the celebratory summer event that he earlier documented. A wrecked boat lies on its side, the burned timbers of what had been squatters’ cabins and shacks tilt in the distance, desolation blows its cold, damp breath across the scene. The bare trees in the background, the burned timbers, and the bleak mood tell us that the dream of an alternative way of living is dead. The hippies are gone. The squatters are gone. The oil refinery remains.

Based in Vancouver at the time (he now lives in Victoria), Stewart was a medical illustrator whose true calling was as a painter and photographer. The introductory panel reveals that, before shooting the images on view here, he had already been documenting Renaissance faires and counterculture festivals throughout the province. His wondrous record of the 1972 Dollarton event, which occurred during the last week of August and the first week of September, takes as its subtext the history of the “embattled” squatters’ village at the festival’s Maplewood Mudflats site. That village had been partially destroyed by authorities in 1971 and was more thoroughly demolished in 1973.

Apart from a shack constructed of old windows, not much squatter architecture is visible in Stewart’s photos. His thoughtfully wielded camera looks, instead, at tipis, tents, and other temporary, fair-time shelters; at the stalls where vendors flog beads, beer, borscht, and peanut-butter sandwiches; and at a couple reading Tarot cards, an old guy screening the fair’s logo onto a T-shirt, a young guy in a long robe proselytizing.

Mostly unposed, the hippies taking part in the fair look just as history tells you they should, with long hair, bell-bottom jeans, and beaded necklaces. With lots of bare flesh, too—the abundant nudity here signifying a collective desire to shed establishment values and inhibitions, to be “free” and “natural”, to get back, as Joni Mitchell once sang, to the Gar-ar-ar-ar-den. Sun worshippers, bongo players, yoga practitioners, beachcombers, corn roasters, and naked children abound, all contributing to what independent curator Bill Jeffries describes as “an experiment in cultural reinvention”. They look happy and relaxed—blissed-out, even—and at that brief moment, why wouldn’t they?

Two other shows are on view here, one dedicated to the hippie movement in Soviet-era Estonia, and the other to old and new photographs by sculptor Liz Magor. One of the West Coast’s most inventive artists, Magor demonstrates an enduring interest in the provisional shelters of those who, for one reason or another, drop out of society. Among a range of black-and-white photos, her images of isolated and abandoned shacks, cabins, and lean-tos on Cortes Island neatly complement Stewart’s Pleasure Faire works. With immense eloquence, Magor uses shelter as a defining metaphor for the divide between the aggressive, acquisitive, and exploitive forces of “civilization” and the marginalized lives of those who choose to renounce the whole dirty business.