[Eight Best Buys, Southern Ontario - detail / 2010]

Iterations is the name of a new ongoing photo series by (peers) Tori Foster and Jesse Colin Jackson. With this project Foster and Jackson have engineered large panoramas of stock architectural forms that superimpose multiple "instances" of the same branded structures. Pictured above is a detail of a big box study that highlights the consistency of Best Buy's architectural standards while also revealing the occupation of adjacent parking lots at eight locations of this franchise. The work operates at multiple speeds – the architectural and graphic identity of each establishment reads as essential form, adjacent structures, road and sidewalk are somewhat fixed while people and vehicles are fleeting ghosts.

These images are thumbnails of two of the full panoramas Seven Essos, Toronto (2009) and Nine Beer Stores, Southern Ontario (2010). The Esso gas station study is quite successful at drawing attention to the canopy as the key architectural feature of the service station typology. As much is the eye is drawn to the static edifice at the centre of each of these images, the elongated field of view provides an informative reading of street, sidewalk and parking lot as zones of activity. On that note, the first thing I thought of when encountering this work was Ed Ruscha's preoccupation with serial studies of banal urban form. Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and Thirtyfour Parking Lots (1967) both exemplify how everyday sites, structures and ritual can be aesthetcized through repetitive, methodical examination. However, I make this comparison somewhat tentatively given that the Iterations series yields "everything, all at once" rather than a deadpan index.

Selections from Iterations will showing in Toronto as part of the Contact Photography Festival for the duration of May at the Arepa Café (490 Queen Street West) – I'm eager to see these large format images in the flesh. Those interested in checking out some larger images of this work should browse Foster's documentation of the project-in-progress

This isn't the first time I've written about Foster's work – she commissioned me to write a short essay [PDF] about her The Impossibility of Understanding in the Path of a Torontonian project earlier this year.