At the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery until December 10

The title of Iain Baxter’s new show of old photographs, Passing Through, quite consciously aligns it with On the Road and Easy Rider. The idea of the drifter unfettered by middle-class values and attachments achieved cult status in Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel and Dennis Hopper’s 1969 film. Dropping out, hitting the road, reading the passing landscape through the windshield of a car or a pair of motorcycle goggles, these activities became metaphors for the Beat and counterculture generations. They also factored into the political critique inherent in conceptual art that, in the 1960s and ’70s, challenged the increasingly commercial and institutional nature of visual art.

Based in Windsor, Ontario, Baxter& added the ampersand to his surname a few years ago, to suggest the open-ended nature of the conceptual undertaking that is his life. The photographs in this show, taken between 1958 and 1983 but previously unexhibited, record a goodly portion of overlooked everydayness, from back-yard barbecues to industrial sites, fairgrounds, strip malls, and Jesus Saves suburban chapels. Such scenes were mostly shot in the Vancouver area, where Baxter& lived from 1964 to 1978. The “passing through” aspect of the show, documenting road trips across Canada and into the United States, is articulated in images of farm fields, highway overpasses, billboards, motel rooms, and a roadside fruit stand, shuttered and deserted under a stormy winter sky. Much use is also made of reflected imagery, bouncing off the side mirrors of Baxter&’s camper or, later, off a handheld shaving mirror.

In their snapshot style, indexical approach, and banal subject matter, Baxter&’s works are consistent with the antiformalist strategies of other conceptual photographers of the time. There are also thematic overlaps with Uncommon Places, the 1970s photo series of vernacular landscapes by the influential American artist Stephen Shore. Unlike Shore’s highly detailed and carefully composed images, taken with a view camera, Baxter&’s use of slide film and a 35mm Nikon has resulted in low-res pictures that are flat, grainy, and occasionally discoloured. Again, these qualities are consonant with the early conceptual agenda.

Although the show includes a few Polaroids, it consists largely of Duratran light boxes and chromogenic prints, digitally converted from Baxter&’s huge inventory of colour slides. Where the original format would have suggested the informality and artlessness of family trips and rec-room slide shows, the current manifestations of this work convey a sense of the fetishized object, of art as commodity. Baxter& began experimenting with light boxes in the late 1960s. However, the form has since become so powerfully associated with the high-end art market and high-art institutions that it is now difficult to grasp its subversive origins.

The artist formerly known as Iain Baxter is best remembered in Vancouver for his 1966–1978 collaboration with his first wife, Ingrid Baxter, in the now-legendary corporate project N.E. Thing Co. Limited, also known as NETCo. Lodged among the many aspects of corporate structure, mainstream culture, and communications technologies that NETCo so wonderfully tinkered with were a commitment to collaboration and a rejection of the individual authorial voice. That’s why it’s curious now to walk through this exhibition of photographs, the majority of them taken during the NETCo years, and find them firmly attributed to Baxter, ampersand not withstanding. Very curious indeed.