peak gallery | contemporary art | zack pospieszynski



peter maccallum
Vimy Ridge, 2005 \| May 3 - May 27, 2006
"Peter MacCallum's Vimy Ridge" The Globe and Mail: Visual Arts Supplement \| Saturday, May 07, 2006 by Gary Michael Dault
	When Toronto-based photographer Peter MacCallum journeyed to France last September to take up a four-month residency at the Canada Council-funded Paris studio, it was his intention to make a study of the city’s water system. This would have been the kind of project consistent with the artist’s ongoing interests in the documenting of the recent industrial past (many of his authoritative photographs pertaining to the history and nature of Ontario’s concrete industry, for example, appeared in Material World, an exceedingly handsome collection of his work published in 2004 by YYZ Books and by Museum London). But a trip to the memorial park at Vimy Ridge in November changed all that. Indeed, between November 15 and December 15 of last year, MacCallum would undertake a total of four trips to the site, in the course of which he would produce the suite of sixteen exquisite black and white photographs which make up his exhibition Vimy Ridge, opening today at Toronto’s Peak Gallery. MacCallum is a painstaking researcher—virtually a historian with a camera—and to talk with him about his projects is invariably to be enriched by his infectious delight in the facts and their varying shades of meaning that form the corpus of his chosen subject. His reading is always prodigious and focussed. And I often feel that it is this kind of deep, beneath-the-waterline knowledge with which he swarms his subject, that helps to infuse each of his photographs with their characteristic calm and authority.


It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows him, that MacCallum has compiled a remarkably full and useful essay-like fact sheet to accompany the present exhibition. Even a quick perusal of it turns up the essential facts about Vimy: that the capture of this strategic ridge by Canadian forces on April 9, 1917, was one of the great military achievements of the Great War; that more than 7000 Canadian soldiers are buried in 30 war cemeteries within a 16 km radius of the Vimy monument; that the magnificent monument itself, a sort of towering, two-part metaphysical tuning-fork designed by Toronto sculptor Walter Allward, took a decade to build, was unveiled in 1936, and is currently undergoing an extensive amount of restoration work to its 15,000 ton, reinforced concrete base—which bears the names of the 11,280 Canadians killed in France during WWI and whose final resting places are unknown. This restoration is being directed by Julian Smith and Associates Architects, Ottawa, and is to be completed in time for the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge on April 9, 2007. The restoration project, as a number of MacCallum’s photographs show, is a matter of considerable physical delicacy. “The long lines of type which stretch across all four faces of the base”, MacCallum writes, “are being replaced using a combination of computer controlled sandblasting and hand carving”. It’s specialized and painstaking work. Some of MacCallum’s Vimy photographs are of the monument itself—or rather of the monument as it is currently sheathed in scaffolding and crystal wrap. These are very striking works, trading in a naturally occurring abstraction of the site generated by the enveloping construction required to support the work’s restoration. MacCallum’s Rooftop Catwalk, Restoration Site, Allward Monument, 2005, for example, slices the site into planes which appear to revolve about a dark, axle-like hole at the photograph’s centre—which is apparently the hole through which you must crawl to enter the space enclosed by the upper scaffolding. His stirring Allegorical Figure Representing “Peace” Atop the West Pylon of the Allward Monument, 2005 shows the figure of Peace, thrust up into the perspectivally dazzling reaches of the upper restoration area, clutching her olive branch (which is swaddled in protective material) and, atop that, her delicate little lightning rod (“she is the tallest spot in the area”, MacCallum tells me, “and she has to have her lightning rod”). But the artist’s other Vimy photographs are no less remarkable. The apparently picturesque The Broadmarsh Mine Crater on the Preserved Battlefield, 2005, for example, initially encourages a feeling for the soft pastoral beauty of the site, which it then adjusts when you come to realize you are gazing upon a landform which is the product of explosions from beneath the lines of trenches—a conventional feature of the underground warfare carried out by both sides during the course of the war. It is the same with MacCallum’s masterful Sheep at Pasture on the Preserved Battlefield, 2005. As the artist has noted—with his characteristically mordant sense of humour—“The shell pocked battlefield is still off limits to visitors because it contains unexploded munitions, but sheep are allowed to graze there. No sheep has ever been lost in an explosion.” Peter MacCallum’s Vimy Ridge runs until May 27 at Toronto’s Peak Gallery, 23 Morrow Ave. 416-537-8108. about the exhibition



peter maccallum
Vimy Ridge, 2005 \| May 3 - May 27, 2006
"Peter MacCallum's Vimy Ridge" The Globe and Mail: Visual Arts Supplement \| Saturday, May 07, 2006 by Gary Michael Dault
	When Toronto-based photographer Peter MacCallum journeyed to France last September to take up a four-month residency at the Canada Council-funded Paris studio, it was his intention to make a study of the city’s water system. This would have been the kind of project consistent with the artist’s ongoing interests in the documenting of the recent industrial past (many of his authoritative photographs pertaining to the history and nature of Ontario’s concrete industry, for example, appeared in Material World, an exceedingly handsome collection of his work published in 2004 by YYZ Books and by Museum London). But a trip to the memorial park at Vimy Ridge in November changed all that. Indeed, between November 15 and December 15 of last year, MacCallum would undertake a total of four trips to the site, in the course of which he would produce the suite of sixteen exquisite black and white photographs which make up his exhibition Vimy Ridge, opening today at Toronto’s Peak Gallery. MacCallum is a painstaking researcher—virtually a historian with a camera—and to talk with him about his projects is invariably to be enriched by his infectious delight in the facts and their varying shades of meaning that form the corpus of his chosen subject. His reading is always prodigious and focussed. And I often feel that it is this kind of deep, beneath-the-waterline knowledge with which he swarms his subject, that helps to infuse each of his photographs with their characteristic calm and authority.


It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows him, that MacCallum has compiled a remarkably full and useful essay-like fact sheet to accompany the present exhibition. Even a quick perusal of it turns up the essential facts about Vimy: that the capture of this strategic ridge by Canadian forces on April 9, 1917, was one of the great military achievements of the Great War; that more than 7000 Canadian soldiers are buried in 30 war cemeteries within a 16 km radius of the Vimy monument; that the magnificent monument itself, a sort of towering, two-part metaphysical tuning-fork designed by Toronto sculptor Walter Allward, took a decade to build, was unveiled in 1936, and is currently undergoing an extensive amount of restoration work to its 15,000 ton, reinforced concrete base—which bears the names of the 11,280 Canadians killed in France during WWI and whose final resting places are unknown. This restoration is being directed by Julian Smith and Associates Architects, Ottawa, and is to be completed in time for the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge on April 9, 2007. The restoration project, as a number of MacCallum’s photographs show, is a matter of considerable physical delicacy. “The long lines of type which stretch across all four faces of the base”, MacCallum writes, “are being replaced using a combination of computer controlled sandblasting and hand carving”. It’s specialized and painstaking work. Some of MacCallum’s Vimy photographs are of the monument itself—or rather of the monument as it is currently sheathed in scaffolding and crystal wrap. These are very striking works, trading in a naturally occurring abstraction of the site generated by the enveloping construction required to support the work’s restoration. MacCallum’s Rooftop Catwalk, Restoration Site, Allward Monument, 2005, for example, slices the site into planes which appear to revolve about a dark, axle-like hole at the photograph’s centre—which is apparently the hole through which you must crawl to enter the space enclosed by the upper scaffolding. His stirring Allegorical Figure Representing “Peace” Atop the West Pylon of the Allward Monument, 2005 shows the figure of Peace, thrust up into the perspectivally dazzling reaches of the upper restoration area, clutching her olive branch (which is swaddled in protective material) and, atop that, her delicate little lightning rod (“she is the tallest spot in the area”, MacCallum tells me, “and she has to have her lightning rod”). But the artist’s other Vimy photographs are no less remarkable. The apparently picturesque The Broadmarsh Mine Crater on the Preserved Battlefield, 2005, for example, initially encourages a feeling for the soft pastoral beauty of the site, which it then adjusts when you come to realize you are gazing upon a landform which is the product of explosions from beneath the lines of trenches—a conventional feature of the underground warfare carried out by both sides during the course of the war. It is the same with MacCallum’s masterful Sheep at Pasture on the Preserved Battlefield, 2005. As the artist has noted—with his characteristically mordant sense of humour—“The shell pocked battlefield is still off limits to visitors because it contains unexploded munitions, but sheep are allowed to graze there. No sheep has ever been lost in an explosion.” Peter MacCallum’s Vimy Ridge runs until May 27 at Toronto’s Peak Gallery, 23 Morrow Ave. 416-537-8108. about the exhibition