David M.C. Miller - white fence at night

Two details

White Fence at Night, Installation views, 2010

Stark and stalwart, white fences erected throughout Lethbridge’s residential neighborhoods are photographed at night using a small digital camera equipped with a flash.

Approaching pure white and absolute stillness, these social and symbolic thresholds announce a persistent ideal that White Fence at Night confronts and situates within a frame.

American photographer Alfred Stieglitz once characterized Paul Strand’s iconic photograph, White Fence of 1916, as “Brutally direct, pure, and devoid of trickery.” Strand declared his image an abstraction, a radical departure from convention. In other words, White Fence was more than a white fence. The image became a conduit to move beyond the grinding inadequacies of dogma and wage labour to a realm of political and spiritual emancipation.

White Fence at Night asserts itself as a work grounded in the material conditions and experiences of commonplace forms. It draws its outlines upon fallacy and failure: modernism’s idealism; Weegee’s spectacle of the everyday; abstract art; upon practices ushered in by the likes of artists Edward Ruscha and Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Inkjet prints, 274cm x 150cm each of four.

installation views: Alberta Biennial 2010, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton.

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