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I n the 1972 painting by jack chambers (1931–1978) entitled Diego Asleep (fig. 17.1), a small child lies sleeping on a sofa in a modern-looking living room. A few articles of clothing lie casually draped over the furniture, and some toys are strewn around. The toy that stands out is a King Kong figure, and it looks as if this pop-culture icon is striding across the floor, away from the sleeping boy and directly toward the viewer. All of this ordinary childish stuff is painted in an impressively realistic and even “photographic” manner, as if this were a snapshot glimpse of a domestic environment. But while Diego Asleep describes the surface appearance of things, I want to argue that this painting also makes evident how images of childhood are linked to memory, pop culture, and the psychodynamics of family life. Although the boy in the picture is not in a conscious state, the artist has turned this to his advantage, by presenting an imaginative forcefield surrounding the sleeping child, as something that threatens to undermine the very logic of realistic representation. This interpretation of Chambers’s painting leads to how childhood (or the memory of childhood) is represented in some recent art practices. In a series of artworks by Daniel Barrow (1971–), old toys, has-been celebrities, and outmoded styles and genres are resurrected from the pop culture of the artist’s youth, becoming narrative trajectories that can accommodate adult desires. In the work of Rodney Graham (1949–), the artist’s unreliable historical re-creations—often based on tableaux from movies, TV shows, or advertisements—are similar to the distorted figurations of childhood memories. Across these three art practices , childhood and adulthood are understood as interlocked forms of consciousness, while an immersion in pop-culture forms and media allows movement back and forth between child and adult selves, and between past and present. SOMETHING RESEMBLING CHILDHOOD Artworks by Jack Chambers, Daniel Barrow, and Rodney Graham JOHANNE SLOAN 365 Jack Chambers: The Sleep of Realism The realistic facture of Diego Asleep is striking, and indeed Chambers was not the only painter of his time intent on reviving realism: the 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of photoand hyper-realisms in the United States, for instance, while the new category of “capitalist realism” was proposed by Gerhard Richter and other German artists. In Canada, Jack Chambers, Alex Colville, Mary Pratt, Christopher Pratt, and Ken Danby are some of the artists who set out to paint realistic scenes of everyday life during this period. Terms such as “high realism” and “magic realism” have at various times been used to describe this Canadian phenomenon, but there is no commonly accepted rubric that adequately covers these diverse art practices.1 Chambers shared with these Canadian and international contemporaries a commitment to older forms of painterly realism, even while acknowledging that photography was the sovereign form of realistic image-making of the late twentieth century. Indeed, for this generation of realists, the artwork would often be the venue for deliberate, confrontational encounters between painting and photography. This in itself signalled a challenge to the tenets of mid-century modernism , because instead of remaining “true” to one particular medium, these artists explored the intersecting techniques, conventions, and ideological suppositions of both painterly and photographic realisms. Chambers does more than merely mimic the effects of photographic emulsion with anachronistic blobs of oily pigment. If Diego Asleep is “like a photograph,” this is because the painting is reminiscent of the lurid colour photography found in mass-circulation publications such as Life magazine, while also pointing to the social environment of suburban life as captured in family snapshots. The proliferation of affordable photographic technologies in the postwar era was accompanied by the (ostensibly democratic ) imperative that everyone should unceasingly document their own families, homes, possessions, pets, and especially children. It is arguably this socio-photographic development that in turn inspired a great deal of this era’s realist painting.2 In Canada, the aesthetic tension in paintings by artists as different as Mary Pratt and Alex Colville is linked to how their artworks both conform to and subtly deviate from the normative poses and scenes of family photo albums. If Chambers was imitating photography, he was also paying homage to the hallowed tradition of painting, the extraordinary realisms of artists like Vermeer and Velázquez, achieved by painstakingly reconstructing the world on a blank canvas. Chambers’s paintings of the mundane environments and encounters of family...

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