Steve Higgins
"Steve Higgins" by Sue Carter Flinn, Spring 2010, p. 122
Steve Higgins is a man of the city; Ihor Holubizky, curator of this exhibition, calls him an astute “observer/flâneur.” One imagines that, strolling through Halifax, the artist has been angered by its generally poor urban planning. He doesn’t point to specific blights, but instead challenges the decision-making that led to those, for example, clogged arterial roads in the first place. Known for large exterior projects, Higgins here presents small-scale models and intaglio prints of invented urban locations that remind us justhow connected we are to the buildings and infrastructures that surround us.
Gullies cut into four tabletop models reveal slices of city landscapes. There’s something disturbing about these sculptures, which are bereft of the buzz of human energy and painted a matte black. Urban 4, which is loosely based on Paris, is bisected by a wide, raised Haussmann-style boulevard. To one side of the boulevard is an aristocratic district, to the other a working-class quarter. A scientific observatory is uselessly tucked into a low recess at the bottom of a hill. Is knowledge no longer a priority? Yet there’s something hopeful in its tiny telescope, which points towards the skies.
Unlike the Nova Scotia artist Carl Zimmerman, who constructs photographs of utopian landmarks, Higgins’s imaginary architecture communicates a dystopian outlook. The convoluted, layered roads and pathways of Urban 5, which was inspired, in part, by Charlottetown’s Confederation Centre Art Gallery (where this exhibition debuted), look like a megacity expressway colliding with an amusement park. And in the subterranean Urban 3, is underground living a survivalist necessity or a historical allusion to the region’s mining industry?
Four works take the form of floor plans: designs for a school, a mobile-home park, a cemetery and a crematorium. The muscular lines on these black-and-white etchings often disintegrate into dirty smudges. Traces of human activity—coffins, trailers—are represented by thick rectangles. In the case of the school, Higgins has adjusted the traditionally hierarchical learning environment: gone is the teacher standing in front of a class; proposed instead is a clustered, more egalitarian approach to learning.
In War and Peace: Rivers of White, Higgins dissects another system. Starting with a paperback of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, he drew lines down each page to delineate the spaces between lines of text that align vertically into typographically unattractive white “rivers.” He then laid pages one on top of another to create 25 ink-jet images that, together, represent the entire book. As Holubizky writes, “History has disappeared into an eternal, flowing river, but at the same time, it is a poetic and literal reading ‘between the lines’ of history, and where the outcome is pure abstraction.”
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