“When an outsider comes to a new place, he sees the picturesque and the freakish, whereas the local sees through layers of emotion and memory.”-Walter Benjamin-

Biliana Velkova’s Tropical Saskatoon uses her outsider’s eye (Velkova comes to Saskatoon from Vancouver via Sofia, Bulgaria) to look at the “picturesque and freakish” of Saskatoon, focusing on the number of fake palm trees in the city. An odd piece iconography for a place that is frozen the better part of the year.

The palms trees are one of the many ways that Saskatoon and fantasy awkwardly mix. When one encounters such an out-of-place image, It feels like a dream from another city that Saskatoon is trying on.The result looks like the creature from John Carpenter’s The Thing. A mix of all the different elements it’s absorbed spewed out in the wrong order. Failed Simulacra. It is this failure that Velkova finds interesting.

Tropical Saskatoon consists of a series of photographs that highlight the markers that  are used to let us know when we’re entering a realm of fantasy, where the regular rules don’t apply. Like the electric palm tree outside of Jaxx’s night club.(Which is either misleading or a perfect descriptor for Jaxx, I’m not quite sure). Velkova invites the viewer to embrace the failed simulacra and acknowledge  it as part of the cities identity. Particularly during the reception, as guests were invited to pretend they were in Hawaii in front of a sunset backdrop, winter coats and all.

Tropical Saskatoon is up at the Frances Morrison Library Gallery for the next month.