Phil Bergerson | Extracts of America

Exhibition Dates: September 15 - October 13, 2001

Phil Bergerson’s fascination with the ironic detritus of North American culture as revealed in the publicly displayed detail is longstanding. First finding expression in the “interior Displays” grids of 1979-80, his work as an archaeologist of popular culture has reached a remarkable resolution in his new work, Extracts of America.

By turns absurd, humorous, painful and poignant, this project is a rich and tumbling index of cultural expression as seen in the architecture, the streets and the signage – commercial, anarchic, eccentric and imploring – of small towns across North America. Its creators include the naïve and the sophisticated and their arena – the facades, display windows, abandoned corners and outskirts of many and varied towns, is the rich multi-layered site of Phil Bergerson’s passionate search.

Moving in the aesthetic terrain which drew Walker Evans and later, Lee Friedlander, Bergerson engages our desire for meaning and renders it cogently through his framing of fortuitous juxtaposition seen within the visual complexity of the landscape. In the signs, scrawled messages, notes and manifestos adorning the vernacular architecture of Main Street, he reveals larger and unintended meaning, proffers understanding more often than not the staging grounds for a variety of urgent personal or community campaigns. With their curious props, recycled mannequins and handwritten announcements, they demand agreement, invite membership, celebrate reunion, ask angrily and anxiously for release from abuse, or are simply incomprehensible. The passage of time is poignantly invoked by these mute, fading and collapsing performances, and, as a hedge against final despair, the benign, transcendent face of Jesus appears insistently, placed hopefully and ubiquitously throughout.

The narrative pulls the viewer through a real-world carnival ride of ambiguity and contradiction. We witness plaster Corinthian columns against cinderblock walls, a crucified tree, dance step diagrams which force collision with a magazine rack, and a dilapidated tree fort more likely to house a broken adult than serve as a child’s secret hideaway. The sequence is a seamless ribbon of affecting visual telling, a series of strongly paired and well-paced photographs which expand and support the project’s central metaphor of cultural archaeology with startling variety.

Peter Higdon

Curatorial Manager

Mira Godard Study Centre

School of Image Arts

Ryerson University, Toronto

The artist gratefully acknowledges the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council, and the support of the Ryerson University Faculty of Communication and Design SRC.