Rewind: Sven Påhlsson
Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square, Oakville
The evening of the opening of Sprawlville, or Life at the Highway Exit Ramp, I took my first-ever trip on a GO Train from Toronto's Union Station, becoming a participant in the daily commute from the city. The 40-minute journey allowed me time to consider the experience of Oakville—a quaint, lovely town with its fine contemporary art gallery—against the cliché banality of Sven Påhlsson's fictional community of Sprawlville.
Påhlsson has presented a restricted view of suburbia based on his own experience—yet one that speaks to contemporary concerns. The contrast between a lifestyle heavily reliant on the media, the automobile and multinational corporations and a traditional European way of life is somewhat jarring, and every aspect of the 13-minute digital-animation piece in his exhibition contributes to this unease.
As the camera rolls along grey streets, passing generic houses devoid of human presence, the pace never slows. The scene is propelled by a mesmerizing soundtrack that suggests the viewer is an outsider, perhaps a member of a fearsome gang. Another section starts with a God's-eye view above a parking lot, from which the camera swoops at vertiginous speed in what seems like an endlessly repetitive suicide fall. It follows a searchlight that winds its way around barren parking lots, much as helicopter police might track drug runners or an escaped convict.
Clearly the medium is the message. As McLuhan once observed, car culture and its consequences, both positive and negative, have arguably been facilitated by America's preference for solitude outdoors. With Sprawlville, Påhlsson insinuates a decline from the freedom of the post-war American dream to society's present relationship with suburbia. This perspective would seem especially relevant given that the events of September 11 have brought to light the fallibility of the great American ideologies.
Amplifying Sprawlville's suburban theme is Påhlsson's editioned series of DVD houses (the Monopoly series), offered on his HTML site. Each is ostensibly taken from the fictional neighbourhood, and these customized houses can be purchased with a choice of accoutrements such as barbecue, boat or car. (In a concession to the art market, the artist assures buyers that this edition of suburban real estate is limited.)
Combining art as real estate with the reality of today's market highlights the similarities between the post-war ideals once thought attainable through the American dream and those now available to collectors of contemporary art. Outdated ideals, wittily repackaged, being sold to collectors seems an intriguing comment on the transient sense of value that is evident within both the art market and society at large.
Summer 2004
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