Steve Higgins: All Things Considered

This exhibition focuses on Higgins’ urban fiction; intaglio etchings, process digital printwork derived from Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and his 2006-2009 Urban sculptures—table size works with modeled fragments of cities past and present.

For over thirty-five years, Steve Higgins’ work has been centred on the social and political aspects of architecture and the urban environment through large-scale temporary projects for public and gallery sites—borrowing from building construction vocabulary and often incorporating sound. His studio practice engages printmaking, drawing, and object-making.

The idea of revealing and reconstructing the past of the urban environment is at the core of Higgins most recent Urban works. Some of this is experiential—Higgins is an astute observer/flâneur. Other elements are drawn from social and political histories, and combined with a “creative” modeling. Each model is table-scaled, in which a cut in the top surface reveals a city fragment in miniature. The most ambitious work in the series, Urban 4 — building upon the Urban 2 reading of conflict for citizens and authority — is loosely based on Paris in transition, or under siege, in the mid-nineteenth century. Higgins makes reference to Baron Haussmann’s redesign and modernization of Paris, at the order of Napoleon III, between 1852 and 1870. Grand boulevards made the streets (arguably) safer, more “sanitary,” and certainly more imperial, but whole neighbourhoods were eradicated. Importantly, insurrections could now be handily dealt with: rebel barricades could not block the broad new streets, and troops could be moved quickly to potential hot spots. In this way the Paris Commune of 1871 was terminated with efficiency and brutality.

Two suites of works on paper reveal and amplify Higgins’s conceptual process. Four etchings (done as drawings and an intaglio artist’s proof in 1992, editioned in 2009) are footprint plans of buildings—a school and a crematorium—and space: a cemetery and a mobile home park. These pieces can be seen as inversions of the Piranesi etchings that faithfully document the views and celebrate the grand remnants of Imperial Rome. But they reveal a strong affinity with other Piranesi. At his most potent, the Italian was far more than a draughtsman “of record”; Carceri d’Invenzione, his architectural “prison” fictions, first published in 1750, share with Higgins’s prints a sense of portent for humankind. The dark labyrinth of our own making is the nightmare.

War and Peace: Rivers of White (2004), Higgins’s first digitally produced work, is conceptually consistent with his way of thinking and his social-historical interests. He began with Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Published in 1869, the novel chronicles Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, and widely seen as the greatest work of fiction on the subject of war. Having selected the best translation available, Higgins drew lines down each page, following the serpentine paths where the spaces between words on consecutive lines of text align vertically; the typographical term for these is “rivers of white,” hence the subtitle. Each of the twenty-five images represents an overlay of fifty-six consecutive pages, accounting for one twenty-fifth of the book.

Steve Higgins was born in Spokane, Washington and graduated with an MFA from Wayne State University in Detroit. From 1974 to 2002, he taught at the University of Manitoba, School of Art.  Since moving to Halifax, he has continued to teach courses at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.  Higgins has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions since 1970, in Canada, the United States, and overseas.

Publication writers: Peter Dykhuis, Cliff Eyland, Ihor Holubizky, Jeanne Randolph, and Liz Wylie.

Related Links:

Canadian Art Magazine – Review by Sue Carter Flinn

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List of Works in Exhibition:

fragment from Urban 1, 2006 (left unfinished)
clear pine

Urban 2, 2006
MDF, wood, mixed media on painted steel stand
83.2 cm high x 80.5  x 109.8 cm

Urban 3, 2007
MDF, wood, paint, mixed media on painted steel stand
83.2 cm high x 100.2  x 104.5 cm

Urban 4, 2008
MDF, wood, paint, mixed media on painted steel stand
83.2 cm high x 100  x 140 cm

Urban 5, 2009
MDF, wood, paint, mixed media on painted steel stand
83.2 cm high x 100  x 120 cm

Plans: School; Crematorium; Mobile Park Home; Cemetery, 1992 (editioned in 2009)
four etchings and intaglio on paper
each, paper size: 91.4 x 129.5 cm

War and Peace: Rivers of White 2004
Inkjet prints, archival inks on paper
25 sheets, each (paper size) 21.5 x 27.9 cm; (image size: 17.5 x 10.2 cm)
Source book:
WAR AND PEACE, Leo Tolstoy, 1869; translated by Ann Dunnigan
A Signet Classic (Paperback)
Publisher: New American Library, a division of Penguin Putnum, Inc., 1969
Library of Congress # 68-31472

War and Peace: Rivers of White, 2008
Inkjet, archival inks on paper, 56 x 43 cm
Single print combining all the “rivers of white” pages 29-1455