The Daves I Know

A portrait of David, age 22 and 32. From Micah Lexier's photo series David: Then and Now. Photo Sheila Spence. Courtesy Plug In ICA.

Artist Micah Lexier was born and raised in Winnipeg, but for the past few years, he’s been living in New York. Currently staying with his parents in his childhood home in the Winnipeg suburb of River Heights, the 44-year-old artist is struck by the contradictory impression — common to people visiting their hometowns — that things are at once similar and different.

“You come back and you really see the changes in people because you’re seeing them after these long increments of time,” says Lexier.

His latest Winnipeg-based project seems to echo his can’t-go-home-again experience. David: Then & Now is a photography exhibition that marks increments of time in a very intimate way: by recording the way the passing years are marked onto our bodies. Sponsored by Plug In ICA (Winnipeg’s Institute of Contemporary Art), the public art project features black-and-white before-and-after photos of men named David, placed in bus shelters around the city. In each case, a life-size photograph taken in 1993 is matched with another taken 10 years later. Don't expect any Fox TV extreme makeovers, though: there is a continuity here that is gently reassuring.

The first set of Davids was taken for A Portrait of David, Lexier's 1994 exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery; it featured photographs of boys and men named David, sequentially representing every age from one to 75. Winnipeg photographer Sheila Spence shot the Davids to Lexier’s exact specifications: in stark black and white on a plain white background, all in an identical pose. Lexier wanted to take away the traditional markers of artistic portraiture, but the final effect is paradoxical. “The more similar the images, the more you notice the differences,” Lexier points out.

Individual Davids can be touchingly specific, from the pugnacious stance of one-year-old David, who is just learning to stand up, to David 67’s rubber galoshes, a vain effort to protect his dress shoes from the Winnipeg snow.

David 7/17. Photo Sheila Spence. Courtesy Plug In ICA.

“Each David represented himself, of course. But you put them side by side and you get this absolutely generalized portrait of growing older,” suggests Lexier. When he started the project in 1993, Lexier had read in the Canadian Global Almanac that the estimated life span of a Canadian male was 75 years. The Davids thus became an oblique kind of self-portrait, part of Lexier's compulsion to explore time, memory, measurement and mortality, and the way these issues are bound up together in the aging process.

Lexier, who attended the University of Manitoba's School of Art and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and has worked in Toronto and New York, was inspired early in his career to tackle the notion of aging by the sudden, astonishing apprehension that he had reached the age his Grade 6 teacher was in 1972. Since then, Lexier has measured out in metal Xs the number of days his grandfather lived (29,064); to represent his own age, he has repeatedly used odd, beautiful materials — wooden spheres, Australian coins and a wall divided proportionately into the years he has lived and the years he can statistically expect to live.

Though Lexier uses the vocabulary of conceptual art — which can be calculated, cool and distant — he always seems to end up with a moving, mysterious expression of very human concerns.

Lexier's original approach to the Davids was purposely flat. There is no big allegorical or symbolic meaning to the name, no clever-clever art-historical allusions to Michelangelo’s Florentine nude intended. Lexier just wanted to pick a moniker that's been consistently popular over the past several decades, in order to increase his chances of snagging a David for every age.

Finding them was a random process. After placing an ad in the Winnipeg Free Press, Lexier explains, “We took down the names of any Davids who called. Then, when we went to book the photo sessions, we just went with whatever David happened to answer his phone.”

While the method was deliberately neutral, even Lexier was surprised by the result. “The show ended up being so open and rich and human,” Lexier says. “It had such a life to it.”

David 38/48. Photo Sheila Spence. Courtesy Plug In ICA.

Audience response was immediate and direct; usually, viewers’ natural impulse was to find the David who shared their age and decide if he looked older or younger, better or worse than them. Winnipeg being such a one-degree-of-separation kind of town, many viewers knew a David or two, or at least found some of them familiar. (Heavily tattooed David 38 seemed to be universally recognizable.)

Lexier has since run into many Davids, or friends of Davids, or people who worked on the David project, which is probably why he started thinking about revisiting the work as its 10th anniversary neared.

He made plans to catch up with the original Davids and re-photograph them. Of the 75 original Davids, 48 showed up for re-shoots. Of the remaining men, six had died, 12 had relocated or were otherwise unavailable and nine simply couldn't be found — all of which made for some poignant gaps.

Lexier regards the second show not as a sequel but as a distinct body of work with different concerns. “The [first David project] was a portrait of one lifespan, from one to 75. Basically, [David: Then & Now] is a portrait of 10 years — what 10 years looks like, what it does to people.”

Of course, what it does depends on the person. Plug In employees have voted David 33/43 the Dick Clark of Winnipeg — the similarity between the two pictures is eerie; this David, at least, seems to have passed through the last decade untouched.

Others have changed, though usually quite subtly. Male aging seems to come down to hair — less on the head, more on the face — and the slight thickening of waists and necks.

There is a burst of change in the little Davids, of course, as round-faced kids turn into teens and gangly teenagers fill out into men, but Lexier finds that after that, “everybody sort of levels off and you are who you are.” Many viewers find this tremendously comforting. The fact that David 71/81 is still looking dapper in the very same cardigan he wore in 1993 suggests that aging might not be the sudden, terrifying drop-off that our youth-obsessed culture makes it out to be.

David 49/59. Photo Sheila Spence. Courtesy Plug In ICA.

If anything, time seems to have helped many of the Davids become more essentially themselves. “A lot of them look as if 10 years has been good to them,” says Lexier. “They've gotten their act together, gotten rid of that bad hair.” Some of the men moving from their 50s to their 60s have loosened up, shedding business suits for sweaters. David 49/59 has lost his beard and revealed not only his face, but a whole different aura.

As he looks over the diptychs that are posted on the Plug In website — along with listings of their bus shelter locations — Lexier exhibits a protective feeling toward his Davids. When he talks of the “grumpy David” or the David who “seems to have turned into his own father” or the David who “got into some kind of trouble, bad trouble” in the intervening decade, he's always careful not to reveal on record which David he’s talking about.

Viewers seem to share this reaction to the photos. “They engender tenderness,” remarks Plug In gallery technician Richard Dyck. Perhaps it comes from the Davids’ awkward, vulnerable pose. Feet together, legs straight, hands primly clasped, their stance has nothing of the confident, heroic attitude of classical Greek sculpture — it's much closer to the sheepish, shielding posture soccer players take when defending against a penalty kick.

Perhaps the viewer’s protectiveness comes from the deep-down knowledge that the passage of 10 years affects us all — it’s just that the Davids are the ones publicly bearing the weight of this time with such good grace.

David: Then & Now appears in various bus shelters around Winnipeg until July 10.

Alison Gillmor is a Winnipeg writer.

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