By Andrew Wright

There is a vague familiarity in the work of Mandy Barber. Not that it is similar to other work, rather it evokes a strange sense of having been there, a visual déjà vu.

In both her large photographs and her video, Barber distills elements of existing in the public and homogenized spaces where we find ourselves so often. Using a repertoire of generic places of transition, both real and constructed locales, Barber examines the unsettling relationship we have with an un-aesthetic architecture of consumer urbanism.

Mall corridors, transportation platforms, and escalatiors become subjects for both scrutiny and celebration. The slickness of Pekao Gallery, with its excessively polished floor, only underscores Barber's cool dramas on the walls. The titles of each are lone punctuation marks, such as –, >, and ( ), which at once reference the organizing structures of language and experience, and brief pauses in speech. These images have indeed been stopped; they reveal moments of waiting, and instants of protracted thought.

Her video, titled simply ..., is placed in the stairwell at the entrance of the basement gallery. Itself a transitory space, the stairwell separates the Bloor Street din from the gallery's quietude. From here, unbalanced and uncertain, we are asked to contemplate an impossibly long moving walkway. I stared, dizzy and transfixed, at the quick yet almost imperceptibly moving image, anticipating in vain that i would actually get somewhere.

A few of the photographs depict people; tiny and faceless forms dwarfed by the antiseptic glow of an overall fluorescent light. One, poignantly titled as empty quotation marks, " " , shows two figures on a generic platform seen as if through closed circuit surveillance. It is at once an anonymous rendezvous, a prelude to a crime, and a mundane moment of waiting. The silence is deafening. What could they say to one another in this world without context?