Jim Breukelman
"Jim Breukelman" by Robin Laurence, Summer 2009, pp. 96-98
Whether it’s topiary, taxidermy or shipbuilding, Jim Breukelman shines a warm, humane light on his photographic subjects. Most recently, in pursuit of what he calls “pocket environments,” he has aimed his largeformat camera at a paintball park in North Vancouver. His curiosity about such places is never condescending and always more than formal, although there is certainly a formalist’s eye at work here. But the real impetus for Breukelman’s images is what he recognizes in his subjects as allegorical, as “evidence of cultural fallout of one sort or another.” Such scenes speak of both individuality and conformity, and tell us much about the everyday strangeness of our lives and times.
This series of lusciously coloured, highly detailed and beautifully composed photographs depicts mostly unpeopled landscapes. They are filled with stacked tires, bunkers made of shipping pallets and upright particleboard panels set against raw earth, thin trees and high mesh fences. Every vertical surface, from shelter to tree trunk, is covered with paint splatter. On a literal level, we understand that this is the fallout of a game—part big-game hunt, part war—in which opponents attempt to shoot one another with paint-filled pellets. Within the context of postmodern art practice, however, the pigmented equivalent of bullet holes we see here is powerfully reminiscent of the New York School of abstraction. Although analogies to the testosterone-driven realm of action painting are most immediately apparent, the palette and the overall effect of the paint-covered surfaces are more suggestive of Jules Olitski than of Jackson Pollock. This colour-field likeness—a kinder, gentler form of male-dominated abstraction—is incidental, yet it tempers any deconstructive reading of the work with feminist irony.
The trees in Breukelman’s paintball landscapes, shot in every season of the year, look skinny and dispirited. They’re many clear-cut generations beyond old-growth forest and their scrawniness contributes to the survivalist mood of the photographs. The golden light of evening throws long shadows across bunkers and blasted stumps alike, adding an elegiac note. Beyond the confines of the paintball park, we get glimpses of railway lines, warehouses, a distant bridge. In Breukelman’s photos, the interface of ugly culture and exhausted nature reveals a place that is charged with far more than it might initially seem. While the artist brings a respectful curiosity to the subject of paintball, it’s possible for the viewer to come away from these images with a sense of sorrow and pessimism.
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