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visual arts Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: The Train as Metaphor Presentation House Gallery presents a show examining the important role that images of trains play in contemporary photography. A wide range of artists including Ron Benner, Vera Frenkel, Angela Grauerholz, Louise Noguchi, and Douglas Walker are featured in this exhibition. Gallery director Bill Jeffries reflects on trains and their symbolism in modern society. by Hill Jeffries / </(> not have an interest in trains as such, rather I am drawn to the image of the train as a symbol of a historical, cultural will. Roy Arden / worked for the Norfolk & Western Railroad {Wabash) out of St. Thomas. Ontario from 1970 (age 21) to 1980 as a brakeman and conductor. During this time I was also a practicing visual artist. Ron Benner Trains, then, are a paradox made present to the imagination You think you are going from A to B. and of course you are, but the journey takes you elsewhere entirely. Vera Frenkel Had someone organized an exhibition of trains in contemporary art back in the year 1900. they would have included the following artists: Seurat. van Gogh. Monet. Emile Bernard, and Paul Signac. amongst others. DeChirico would have come later, as would Charles Sheeler. the American who captured trains in photographs as well as paint. The reason these artists pictured trains was, for the most part, quite different from the reasons behind the works in the new exhibition of train images at Presentation House Gallery. Turn-of-the-century artists were interested in depicting the fringes of the city and its suburbs, those newly accessible areas that must have seemed not only like a new universe, but also like an extraordinary combination of the rural and the urban. Those paintings were, in every way. pictures of "the best of both worlds." A century has gone by since the trainscapes of van Gogh's France evoked their sense of an expanding world, simultaneously populated by women walking beneath their parasols and strange mechanical contrivances belching smoke above their heads as is the case in his 1887 painting The Bridges, Asnieres.Beautiful though van Gogh's painting is, it seems, as would those by the other artists named above, very literal, like a post-Impressionistic child of midnineteenth-century Realism. They are pictures of a "moment in time," not unlike a documentary photograph. Conversely, many of the works in the Track Records exhibition have a sensuousness that is commonly associated with painting or lithography. This dreamy sensuousness is especially true in works by Vera Frenkel, Angela Grauerholz, and Douglas Walker. Trains are powerful mechanisms, but they are also metaphors for power. They are models of corporate organization (if they are "on time" then the It is not so much the trains themsetvti that interest me. hm rather the act of travelling by tram which, for IIH. encorporates memories of Europe and past and futun adventures. Angela Grauerholz The diesal engine is great-it's very efficient and then's nothing like them. But they'll never replace the steam engine. O. Winston Link The image of the train {on a journey across the West I mil a big part o] the imagery of Japanese-Canadian history. As the train slowed I saw people leaping off and disappearing into the brush. Musi have been ghosts. 1 figures... Glenn Rudolph destiny/destination, framed gelatin silver prints with sandblasted lettering, by Louise Noguchi When thousands of Ions of steel blast by, it feels inches awa) and st'tti bones shake. The roar of the freight cars is like a physical assault...And then it's gone, buck to the stars and emptiness. Douglas Walker