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Artspace Footprints in light With a new director/ curator in the driving seat and a wide-ranging mandate, Presentation House Gallery is set to make a bigger splash than ever. Alexander Rodchenko. Rodchenko, Modern Diver, 1934. Modern gelatin silver "Alexander Photography, exhibition Photomontage photothe graph. Collection of Howard Schikler. From and Film," first major Canadian tivist's photographs tional tour. of this seminal Russian construc- and the only stop in Canada on an interna- Presentation House Gallery is one of North Van's most delightful surprises, for visitors and locals alike. Whoever would have thought that the airy old city hall at the corner of Chesterfield and 3rd would end up as a photo gallery of international repute? " G o to South Granville's gallery row today and half the galleries are showing photo art of some kind," says Bill Jeffries, who has just taken over as director and curator. "But that's a pretty recent development." After the Nova Gallery closed in 1981 there was virtually nowhere downtown showing photography -- a gap Jeffries filled in 1983 with his own photo gallery, the Coburg. On the North Shore, though, there was more interest. In 1981 Presentation House was in its third year as a community art centre, and it was at gallery director Chris Tyrell's urging that year that Presentation House Gallery became a space showing photographs exclusively. In 1993, after leaving his post as director and curator of the Contemporary Art Gallery, Jeffries joined PHG as a board member. Now he's here full time, charged with implementing the gallery's mandate, which is to show photographic work, photo-related work and media art, such as film and video -- or stuff that hasn't even been invented yet. "Museums now commonly exhibit moving pictures digitally, bypassing actual film or video," Jeffries says. "Our mandate allows us to explore all these media in the most broadbased way possible." There's no shortage of material to draw from. "There was a cliche back in about 1985 that there were a billion photographs made every day. I don't know what the figure is now. But it must be at least five or even ten billion." Jeffries says that at least part of the photograph's appeal in the past has been its apparent representation of truth. "One can make some claims for the photograph as a medium being different from other kinds of picturing media. One major insight that people had back in the seventies was that in terms of the language of signs and symbols the photograph was qualitatively different from other kinds of picture-making tools. As Susan Sontag said, it bears the same relationship to the thing it is picturing as a footprint. Instead of being a sign that someone has manufactured to carry meaning, the photo is an imprint, called an index. Part of its so-called truth value, in that you could actually believe what you see, was premised on this. To the extent that the photograph is an index it is a bearer of one kind of truth. "But this truth value had been threatened long ago, either by photomontage or by photos that had been altered. Now it's been completely undermined by digital work. We don't really believe in the photograph as being a bearer of truth any longer. It's a completely changed universe now. From the point of view of its relation to the sign and the index, the photograph has actually moved toward painting and drawing -- closer toward drawing, I would say, March | April 21 From the recent Jin-me Yoon show Touring Home From Away