James Bay Cree Documentary (1973/2014)

A documentary photographic series on life in the northern Quebec James Bay Cree communities during their negotiations over land rights and self-determination, later digitized and repatriated. Black-and-white photographs.

China-in-Transition (1985–2007)

12 sets of 2x2 polyptychs, 48 photographs of hand-painted billboards found in Guangzhou, Xian, Beijing, and Shanghai in summer 1985, reading their propaganda, film posters, and early advertising as a document of China's move from the post-Cultural Revolution era toward industrial modernization. Digital color inkjet prints (editions of 40"x60" and 80"x120").

Urban Nature (1975–1980)

Documentary-tradition photographs made walking urban and suburban environments and, later, night construction yards, orchestrating banal subject matter into formal balance with daylight strobe to heighten the image's artifice. Gelatin silver prints (24" x 30").

Floating Objects (1980)

Photographs made at night in construction sites, where the artist throws disparate materials into the air and catches them mid-flight with a flash, producing gravity-defying, Surrealist-tinged compositions that turn chance into a visual archaeology of the site. Gelatin silver prints (24" x 30").

Catalog of Found Objects (1975)

Cast-off objects gathered from a vacant lot like an archaeologist's finds, then laid out on computer paper and photographed as still lifes, their juxtapositions revealing the secret language of consumer detritus against a backdrop that evokes electronic memory. Gelatin silver prints.

Syntax of the Copy (1977)

A still-life series juxtaposing found construction-site objects with their stat-machine facsimiles, made after-hours in a commercial photo studio to probe the relationship between the real and the copy. Gelatin silver prints, hand-tinted (20" x 24").

Everyday Stories (1979–1980)

Photographic compositions of studio odds and ends, grouped into four series that vary the balance between image and text, investigating how the ordering of objects and their juxtaposition with culturally loaded language shapes narrative meaning. Hand-tinted gelatin silver prints mounted on foamcore (101.5 x 132.0 cm).

SX-70 Studies (1978–1980)

One-of-a-kind Polaroid studies made as quick, lo-tech warm-up sketches for the artist's large-format staged studio compositions, their casual, contrasty materiality allowing images that the complexity of full studio staging would otherwise foreclose. SX-70 Polaroids, one of a kind.

Still Lifes (1977–1981)

Studio tableaux combining everyday objects with drawings, words, and rough constructions of cardboard, tin foil, or plywood, condensing scenes into a few basic symbols, a cut-out tank and a crushed figure in a TV frame, to cast an ironic gaze on the stereotypes hardening in social discourse. Hand-tinted gelatin silver prints (30" x 36").

Corporate Culture (1984)

Large-format studio still lifes on the staging of photographic portraiture, drawing on advertising imagery, a stock brokerage's 1981 annual report, and staged political portraits to expose how such pictures encode belief systems. Gelatin silver prints, color or metallic surfaces (40 x 52" each).

Posing Series (1985)

A montage weaving 1960s snapshots from two family albums, a G.I. serving in Vietnam and two sisters in suburbia, into a filmic parallel that magnifies the gestural coding of gender and the era's stereotypes, with silver and gold tones alternating the two worlds. 12 gelatin silver prints on silver and gold metallic paper (101.5 x 101.5 cm and 101.5 x 132.0 cm).

Refraction (2011)

Eight lenticular compositions built from black-and-white photographs the artist took at the 1972 Hungarian Ball in Montreal, grouping each into three interlaced stills so the image shifts and animates as the viewer moves, turning documentary outtakes into a cinematic play of memory and pastness. Photographic film on lenticular lens (32" x 47", edition of 5).

On the Road (2013)

A suite of twelve lenticular panels drawn from photographs taken during the artist's 1970–71 year-long trip through Europe and the Middle East, each keyed to a place and layered so the images shift and animate as the viewer moves, building a cinematic narrative named for Kerouac's Beat classic. Photographic film on lenticular lens (32" x 47", edition of 5).

Day & Night (2015)

A series of lenticular photographic prints that shift between day and night states as the viewer moves, alongside Anamorphic Fluid, a real-time Kinect-activated visualization. Lenticular photographic print mounted on honeycomb aluminum (sizes vary).