The Altered Landscape At Presentation House Gallery until May 30 Strip mines, clear-cuts, and nuclear test sites; power plants, highway construction, and tract housing; a graffiti-covered boulder and a cactus riddled with bullet holes--the images in The Altered Landscape are both powerful and unnerving. Cocurated by Presentation House Gallery director Bill Jeffries and Diane Deming of the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, the exhibition is drawn from the NMA's signature collection of contemporary landscape photographs, with a focus on those works that reveal changes--mammoth or minuscule--wrought upon the natural environment. The show, which comprises 106 photographs by 38 artists, including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Mark Klett, Patrick Nagatani, Mark Ruwedel, and Sharon Stewart, raises many questions about our shifting relationship to nature, and the corresponding shift in the way we conceive landscape imagery. Most of the photographs shown here were taken in the American West, where notions of untamed wilderness still survive, and where vast tracts of arid and mountainous land seem to rebuff human attempts to conquer and exploit. (Seem to--but don't.) There are also a few images here of other parts of the world: blood-red nickel tailings in a burnt-out landscape near Sudbury, Ontario (by Ed Burtynsky); oil-storage tanks in the Israeli desert (Avi Holtzman). An overarching question posed by the curators is whether there remains, on our planet, anything resembling an unaltered landscape. Global warming and acid rain may effect changes in places in which no one has yet set foot or focused camera upon. Even the presence of the photographer in an otherwise isolated location is a form of incursion, intervention, alteration. Many of the artists represented here have abandoned romantic ideals of natural beauty, untainted by humankind. To perpetuate such notions, their work suggests, is to delude ourselves, to fail to address what's really happening out there. Sierra Club representations of glorious or sublime nature, in which we may find creative inspiration or spiritual renewal, have been rendered obsolete by the immense, banal, or destructive works of humankind. Banal and destructive are my words. Many of the Altered Landscape's photographers maintain a studied neutrality toward their subjects, a detachment that refuses either aesthetic or ecological judgment. Others, however, employ sardonic humour, and still others express measured condemnation. An example of the latter is Stewart's "Toxic Tour of Texas" series, documenting industrial pollution and government indifference in image and text. A few of the landscapes represented here have been altered as the result of flooding or volcanic eruption, or through creative activities, as manifested in ancient aboriginal petroglyphs and pictographs or contemporary nonaboriginal earth art. It's interesting to compare Marilyn Bridge's aerial view of an prehistoric geoglyph of a rattlesnake in Arizona with Mark Klett's long shot of a dirt-bike loop in Utah. Even in this jaded age, we admire certain kinds of large-scale mark-making as culturally significant and deplore others as mindless vandalism. Although the record of human activity is everywhere in this exhibition, there are almost no images of living human beings. Robert Adams's classic 1968 black-and-white photo, Colorado Springs, Colorado, in which a woman is silhouetted in the window of a sterile new bungalow, is a rare exception. The photographic movement represented here was first identified and defined in the 1975 exhibition The New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Influenced by the deadpan, anti-aesthetic approach of photoconceptualism, the New Topographics artists challenged existing notions of both landscape beauty and photographic beauty, and focused on evidence of industrialization and urbanization. They also attempted to eradicate personal style from their photographs, and the question of style versus stylelessness hovers over The Altered Landscape, too. Whatever neutrality an artist may aspire to, however, each one inevitably expresses his or her values through both the choice of subject matter and the way it is conveyed. As distressing as much of this imagery is to those who deplore the vast-scale destruction of the natural environment, it's possible to emerge from the gallery thinking, "Wow, what a beautiful show!" Clearly, our aesthetic expectations of landscape photography have changed, along with our ideas of what is worthy of an artist's scrutiny. Looking at an image of grain silos in the rolling California countryside, burning oil sludge on a wide Colorado plain, or a nuclear generating station in the Arizona desert, we accept that this is the way things are now, that these photographs tell a contemporary truth. And truth, as John Keats wrote, is beauty. Dammit.

The Weather At the Charles H. Scott Gallery to May 2 Weather is an inevitable topic, for innumerable reasons. "Conversation about the weather," Oscar Wilde once remarked, "is the last refuge of the unimaginative." Paul Auster, however, has countered with the observation that "To discuss weather with a stranger is to shake hands and put aside your weapons; it is a sign of good will, an acknowledgment of your common humanity..." Curator Cate Rimmer quotes both these writers and a flurry of others in the brief, smart essay that accompanies this exhibition. She also remarks that in human encounters, "weather is invoked repeatedly as a kind of ritualistic way into acquaintance." It permeates not only our most rudimentary attempts at social connection but also our sense of regional and national identity and the ways we lead our lives. Rimmer observes weather's vast power and equally vast capriciousness, its potential to grow crops or lay waste the land, to bathe our skin in life-giving vitamin D or carry away houses. All these observations are obvious, of course, and it's Rimmer's challenge to present weather-themed art that is anything but commonplace. Her show brings together nine artists of diverse backgrounds, locales, and media. The colour photograph that greets you upon entering the gallery, Tania Kitchell's Stable Conditions, is a nifty introduction to the show. An out-of-focus close-up shot of an unprotected human head sprinkled with snow, it communicates both vulnerability and delight. More ingeniously, the Toronto-based artist has also produced Body Gear, fabric sculptures in the form of semi-fantastical cold-weather clothing. Her not-quite-functional ski masks, gloves, and leggings knit a sci-fi silliness into the Canadian struggle with weather conditions. Winter weather intersects with performance in Belgian artist Edith Dekyndt's Program for a Cold Place. Undertaken in Churchill, Manitoba, at í‚ ­30í‚ º Celsius, the work captures two complementary events that play over and over (with slight variations) in DVD projections in the gallery: a bottle of liquid sits in a snowy subarctic landscape, freezes, and explodes; a soap bubble, formed between partially cupped bare hands, freezes and blows away. The moment at which this delicate membrane solidifies in the form of a gossamer heart and is lifted by the wind is both beautiful and painful, evoking human suffering and, again, vulnerability in the immense, indifferent cold. Rimmer uses the term pseudo-science to describe both Dekyndt's work and that of Vancouver artist Antonia Hirsch. Hirsch's Science of Language and Humidity (excerpt) is a conceptual project that teeters somewhere between the poetic and the didactic. On a shiny metal stand, the artist has mounted a modified hygrograph, a device for measuring atmospheric humidity invented by pioneering 18th-century Swiss meteorologist Horace Bénédict de Saussure, and a copy of Course in General Linguistics written by his grandson, the famed linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. She has also read out loud from the latter into a modified version of the former and the framed results of her "experiment" are shown here: horizontal pieces of hygrographic paper inscribed with slightly fluctuating lines, together with citations to the read text. What Hirsch is measuring, Rimmer notes, is the weather within the human body. It's a gorgeous premise--conjoining the two Saussures and recording the moist gusts of the human voice--but it's somewhat undermined by the visual sterility of the work on view. Lisa Robertson's poetics are mostly unencumbered by machinery. The Vancouver poet (who also writes under the conceptual entity The Office for Soft Architecture) reads from her 2001 book The Weather, on an audio recording in a listening station located in the windowed corner of the gallery. (You can slip on headphones and listen.) Also poetic is David Crompton and Andrew Herfst's audio-visual work in progress, Fieldbook; three excerpts from it play here in the form of a large DVD projection with richly textured sound. The Vancouver artists take us from the windy deck of a B.C. ferry to a montaged series of elevators in rainy SkyTrain stations to a subway station in Montreal at a shiny, fluorescent-lit remove from the elements. In each segment, people walk, run, leap, sit, and wait, against a track of ambient sound, evocative music, and speaking voices. It's a beautiful meditation on place and on the ways we pass through, are buffeted by, or take refuge from the weather. It's indicative too of the larger achievements of the show, which wrests something profound out of the most prosaic of topics.

From frenetic squirrels to space-station stillness, artists' images mark the minutes both quickly and slowly Hurry Slowly At the Or Gallery until April 17 Hurry Slowly brings together nine young and emerging artists in an examination of time and its relationship to human enterprise, especially the making of art. From snow shovelling, canoe paddling, and nut gathering to sitting catatonically in a particleboard space station, and from painting, performance, and photography to virtual storytelling, this show proposes a multitude of strategies for getting and spending time. And for deconstructing it. Walk into the gallery and we are immediately enveloped in Jen Weih's mixed-media installation, Apollo Hall. Weih has created a dimly lit environment using the simplest means and materials: silvery-grey benches, wall-mounted vertical strips of reflecting Mylar, an abstract drawing in reflecting tape, and a disorienting soundtrack. That track, created by slowly hand-turning an old LP of Austrian waltzes and polkas, contributes a lugubrious aural texture to the visually slick surround, a drugged sense of altered reality in which time is as warped as our reflections in the Mylar. Making reference to the lobbies of nightclubs and condominium towers in the fast-developing neighbourhood surrounding the fast-developing Downtown South gallery, Apollo Hall (the name alludes to a party palace in 19th-century Vienna) questions the ways architecture, over time, intersects with prevailing attitudes toward public and private, sexuality and desire. Using pop music and dance as her metaphors, Weih asks us to think about the rules that govern how we negotiate our bodies--and our fantasies--through the built environment. (The polkas and waltzes that play unrecognizably on the soundtrack, the work reminds us, were the wildly popular dirty dancing of the 1800s.) Around the corner, look for Eleanor Morgan's small DVD works, Squirrel Digging and Spider Drawing. The former, projected at floor level in a corridor that leads nowhere, is a brief, speedy loop of a squirrel burying something in the ground and covering it with a couple of yellow leaves. The image plays backward and forward, silently and continuously, establishing a frenetic visual rhythm of digging and undigging, covering and uncovering, all of which bears way too much resemblance to the meaningless, ever-accelerating, Sisyphus-like busy-ness of our own lives. Morgan uses, as her recurring metaphor, animals known as "cultural followers"--animals that have adapted their lives to those of their human neighbours. Her Spider Drawing is another blackly humorous expedition along the nature-culture interface, one that flips that idea of adaptation and draws--literally--a line of human production from the animal world. This DVD intercuts slow-motion, close-up images of a spider descending through space on its own thread and of that thread being cut by a large pair of scissors (the reverberant metallic snip of the scissors is the work's only sound), with fast-motion shots of the artist's hands constructing a still-life drawing out of the strands of a spider's web. It's extremely clever and effective, making us mindful, again, of both our interconnections with the natural world and our anthropomorphic readings of animal behaviour. (What we have here is a kind of nature-based neo-existentialism for the new millennium.) Nadia Myre's sepia-toned film Portrait in Motion documents a performance she gave in September 2001. The artist is seen slowly paddling a canoe (a sculpture of birchbark and aluminum, made by Pinock) out of the mist and toward the camera, against a soundtrack of swishing water and birdcalls. Her work critiques not only the colonizing relationship between film and anthropology, but also the romantic impulse to conflate First Nations peoples with the natural world--and to appropriate both in assertions of Canadian identity. Demian Petryshyn's video, The International Space Station 2004, also incorporates an aspect of performance: after a series of shots of a model station floating in blackness, the camera lingers on the artist-astronaut as he sits, unmoving, in an all-white, capsular environment. Occasionally, there is a flicker of movement--eyes blink and shift direction, head turns slightly--but mostly there is depressed, impotent stillness. In his statement, Petryshyn writes that his work poses questions about "masculine gender, consumer desire and narrative technologies". It also seems to examine our benumbed complacency in the face of Star Wars technologies and the expansion of capitalistic and militaristic interests into space. Oh, and there's a nice bit of serendipity, here, too. The shots of Petryshyn's rotating station oddly and primitively evoke the protracted docking scene in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey--the scene that memorably takes place against the soundtrack of Johann Strauss's The Blue Danube waltz. Playing behind Petryshyn's video--and throughout the exhibition--is the hallucinogenic dirge of Weih's radically decelerated waltzes. Time warps and wobbles. It's a nice touch.

Blond With Dark Roots At the Douglas Udell Gallery until April 10 Perhaps it's the season: romance novels are busting out all over. Rita McBride at Artspeak, Natasha McHardy at the State Gallery, and Natalka Husar at the Douglas Udell Gallery all use pulp-fiction images and conventions in works of satire and social commentary. Husar's work, in particular, has generated interest and controversy. Born in New Jersey and based in Toronto, Husar has long been identified with big, kitsch-laden, surreal paintings that explore the busy intersection of cultural dislocation, gender roles, and overconsumption. Drawing on her Ukrainian background, she crams her tableaux with images of consumer objects, arrangements of pattern and texture, fictional narratives, unflattering self-portraits, and composite characters whose relationships to each other, she said in a recent interview with the Straight, are more significantly about history and geopolitics than emotion. Blond With Dark Roots, the series of salon-scale paintings on view, suspends pairs of young Slavic girls somewhere between pictorial and theatrical space, childhood and adulthood, aspiration and failure. The girls--who Husar says are both "manipulated and manipulating"--exist as metaphors of recent migrations from the deprivations of post-Soviet Eastern Europe to the material excesses of contemporary North America. Against backdrops of draped fabric, photomurals, lace curtains, and floral carpets, they try on fur coats, acrylic nails, and Playboy T-shirts along with adult sexuality and western prosperity. None fit. Complementing the paintings--and creating a soap-operatic "mini-narrative"--are 16 altered, vintage Harlequin-romance covers. In most cases, Husar has maintained the titles and authors but overpainted the cover illustrations, teaming the girls of her Blond series with another composite character, a slack-bellied, middle-aged man with glasses. He signals what is pathetic and unromantic about the story evolving here. In their hectic compositions and kitsch sensibilities, Husar's paintings are reminiscent of those created by American photorealist Audrey Flack three decades ago. Both artists share a hard, glittery, visual-bombardment approach to representing the material world. Husar eschews Flack's photographic slickness, shifting from passages of tight realism to passages of loose brushwork, scumbling, and impasto. Her work is often aggressive, awkward, and alienating. Husar's expressive Harlequin covers are, curiously, more successful than her large paintings, possibly because the former are so compositionally condensed and stylistically focused. Whatever her scale, however, Husar makes her viewers squirm with discomfort, as if her paintbrush were a fingernail dragged across a blackboard.