more about the streetcar

This year’s Contact Festival connects modern trends in photography and technology with the 30th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan’s death.  The theme, “Pervasive Influence”, considers how the illusions of the photograph inform the myths of our culture and its individualistic and consumerist manifestations.  In my installation, “What does it mean to be a human being?”, I focus on India and Nepal, two nations that have been simplified through imagery as war-torn and poverty-stricken, or as tourist attractions to be checked off.  My photos portray a competing idea – a world of impoverished happiness and maybe even love – and attempt to posit a new type of connection to a billion people often treated as potential resource competitors, aid recipients, or terrorists in training.  These insidious simplifications pervade our society, justifying our pursuit of wars in Asia, our promotion of offshore resource degradation in order to create our consumer society, our reluctance to adjust our lifestyle to match environmental realities, and our tacit support of a wide net of charities and NGOs that intend to inculcate the Other into a Western way of life.

Inspired by McLuhan’s “the medium is the message”, I’ve taken the photos off of the gallery walls, exhibiting instead in the interior ad space of TTC Streetcar #4025, which will be operating on normal service for the month of May, rotating daily between the 11 downtown lines.  By doing so, I’m exploring the way that cultural myths and personal identities are continually refined by the many thousand messages city commuters consume daily.

My exhibit was chosen by the Toronto Star as one of 10 exhibits worth viewing in a Contact Preview article (http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/whatson/article/801893–contact-festival-plenty-of-eye-candy-in-the-brothel-without-walls).  I also received an extensive profile on the cover of the Entertainment section of the Sunday Star (http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/806573–brush-with-death-made-jordan-bower-get-serious-about-photos ).