The Globe and Mail

The exhibition Is There a There There?, the touring show on now at Oakville Galleries, takes its name from a famous remark made by Gertrude Stein regarding the subject of suburbia. In a disparaging state of mind, something of a chronic condition for American modernism's dowager queen, she said of her home town Oakland, Calif., "There is no there there." It had all the demonstrable attributes of locale, after all, and she had spent years of her life living there. Yet she found it to be devoid of a sense of place, character, presence. It was there, but it could, in fact, be anywhere. Places like Oakland, Calif., or Richmond, B.C., or Oakville, Ont., where this exhibition is currently being mounted, share a certain sociological topography: a smattering of historic buildings progressively overwhelmed by a tide of standard issue new construction that seems the same the world over. Growth is planned and streamlined, rather than unfolding in the time-lapsed higgledy-piggledy way of yore. In some cases, whole communities spring from the ground overnight. Behind the growth is the driving engine of the real-estate industry, providing housing often for aspiring immigrant populations for whom these bulldozed farmlands and woods, stripped now to the stony soil beneath, seem like the promised land.