Barrie Jones: Urban Wild

Barrie Jones is a lens-based artist and a former professor of photography at the University of British Columbia. Over the course of his 40 year career much of his practice has focused on documenting human behaviour. Jones’s photographs draw attention to small moments of the everyday, from labourers at work to leisure activities, to subtle facial expressions and bodily movements. This exhibition explores Jones’s outdoor photography, featuring Vancouverites interacting with urban green spaces throughout Vancouver and the North Shore.

Jones’s photography is inspired by real-life scenes that he observes within his day-to-day existence. The artist asks members of the public to replicate their movements for a photograph, directing them to “play themselves” in a heightened re-creation of reality. This type of photography – straddling photo-conceptual and documentary – highlights the performativity and the absurdity of human behaviour. The images contain both humour and theatricality, transforming mundane occurrences into intriguing examinations of the human experience.

The subjects in Jones’s outdoor photographs are shown performing rituals associated with labour and pastimes. Individuals are seen urban foraging, forest bathing, and recklessly casting themselves into the ocean from high vantage points. While the images in this exhibition resonate deeply with Vancouver’s long-standing “back to the land” hippie culture of the 1970s, they also inherently intersect with the disparate social and economic conditions felt by each person photographed. Indicative within these works are the difficulties in living in a city where the cost of living is high, and economic crises impact its most vulnerable people.

The settings of Jones’s outdoor images are highly familiar to Lower Mainland locals. They include public parks, local forests, and tree-lined streets. Within the region, lush vegetal beauty and ocean ecosystems exist alongside heavy industry. Towering granaries and empty East Vancouver lots are set against a backdrop of rugged snow-capped mountains. Victorian-era homes are nestled among “Vancouver Specials,” which were widely produced between the 1960s and 1990s as affordable housing. Those who live in the Lower Mainland tend to develop a certain fondness for the aesthetic contradictions of this place.

There is also a historic familiarity at play within Jones’s outdoor photographs. For millennia, humans have been depicting the natural environment. This has contributed to a visual language of the landscape as a genre. During the height of the early colonial era, Romantic painters of the 17th and 18th centuries were fascinated by wild, untamed landscapes, often producing images depicting a lone European traveller looking out over vast mountainous valleys and tempestuous seas. As North America was colonised and settled, Pastoral paintings were popularised, which depicted images of farmers and workers in fields. Jones’s outdoor images remix these historic visual tropes.

The term “urban wild” is defined as a remnant of a natural ecosystem found in the midst of an otherwise highly developed urban area. This exhibition beckons visitors to be curious about spaces around them that are often taken for granted. It is within these places that we seek refuge, safety, inspiration, and solace.