Shannon Oksanen: Soft Summerlanding

The poster image for Shannon Oksanen’s new exhibition “Summerland” shows her painting of army-era Elvis, black guitar in hand, next to a phonograph. He looks like he is listening, but maybe he’s just daydreaming. In a few years, out of one uniform and into many others, he’ll be dancing and singing with Ann-Margret in the film Viva Las Vegas. For her show, Oksanen remakes this film in 35mm, focusing on the happy abandon of its water-skiing sequence. The painstaking recreation of 1960s fluff and fun isolates a moment of cultural change, of an innocence that in memory now seems as soft as the features on Elvis’s face in Oksanen’s painting.

In her descriptive text for the exhibition, curator Jenifer Papararo writes, “The image of Elvis becomes not just the symbol of the pop star but also a signal for a perfect ‘then’ in the not so good ‘now.’” The combination makes for another interesting step in Oksanen’s progress as an artist increasingly capable of retrieving the dream life of a consumer society that is now passing into history. (555 Nelson St, Vancouver BC)