Around 11AM our minivan bound posse rolled out of Calgary, destination: Banff. After about an hour on the road we arrived, heading straight to Wild Flour Bakery for tasty nosh, tea, coffee and tart unsweetened lemonade. From there we wandered to the Whyte Museum to see the Burtynsky show and examine some fascinating artefacts from early Banff life.

Of course this casual meandering was just a prelude to our primary objective: the exhibition Once Upon a Time by British artist Steve McQueen at the Walter Phillips Gallery. Steve McQueen has an impressive CV, notching the Turner Prize in 1999 and representing England at the upcoming Venice Biennale. I recently saw McQueen's thought provoking stamp project Queen and Country in Edinburgh, but had little idea what to expect from this recent work at WPG. Having briefly read that Once Upon a Time utilizes materials from the Golden Record (a time capsule sent into space aboard Voyager 1 and 2) I assumed some rumination on utopia (and its representations in the near past) would play into the content of the exhibition. These conjectures were on my mind as we crossed the threshold into Glyde Hall and walked past the newly installed WPG desk.

Upon entering the exhibition space proper a large darkly painted wall blocked direct entrance to the gallery, shifting movement to the left or right. A small didactic text on this wall described the technical specs of the piece. Underfoot panels of interlocking grey felt tiles covered the floor, dampening sound and footfalls. At point of entry my eyes were adjusting to near total darkness while my ears absorbed the recorded sound of a person speaking in a language of which I was unfamiliar. Narration by a series of individuals in this 'language' would continue through the entire 70 minute duration of the project. After I turned the corner around the front wall a large projection screen became visible, illuminated with cross-fading photographic images depicting the visible spectrum of light and the surface of the moon (this is neither the beginning nor end of the piece, simply the moment at which I entered). Progressively, the image of the moon became sharper while the light spectrum faded. Gradually, the image of the moon began to fade as well, being replaced by yet another image, with this process recurring throughout the entire sequence of 116 photographs and diagrams.

STEVE MCQUEEN, Once Upon a Time, 2002, Courtesy: Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

The images in the slideshow are remarkable, including general to specific documentation of life as we understand it (or life as we understood it in 1977 according to Carl Sagan and the other individuals who compiled the Golden Record). Each of the pictures have been appropriated by McQueen from the original slides included in the Golden Record, creating a seamless sequence which moves from the basic elements of life to the most complex examples of human ingenuity and back again. Conspicuous is the lack of images portraying war, poverty, famine, disease, environmental destruction and so on. If the Golden Record was intended to provide an accurate understanding of our world, one must assume that aliens with knowledge of this document will be shocked by the level of misrepresentation once they arrive on earth.

Of course the tension in Once Upon a Time is not only developed by the relationship between the images and the real world they deign to portray, but also the odd pairing of sound and image in the work. What at first sounded like a foreign language, is in actuality a series of recordings of people speaking in tongues (although a companion of mine noted that one of the recordings is spoken in a decipherable form of Portuguese). The effect of this soundtrack establishes a specific alienation in the viewer, forcing them to look upon these images as unfamiliar, despite their ubiquity. Rather than reassurances of the meaningfulness of each slide, the soundtrack begs us to ponder what it would be like to experience the pictures if we had no prior knowledge of their content. While experiencing the work I was reminded of Julia Kristeva's book Strangers to Ourselves and I began to think about the subtle empathetic thrust underlying McQueen's project. In this sense, Once Upon a Time asks us to consider the supposedly objective images of the Golden Record from a viewpoint which is not our own and casts doubt on the possibility of expressing our world through an authoritative set of representations, theories, laws or ideals. The result I found was an experience of 'othering' in me, mixed nearly simultaneously with an ambiguous nostalgia for a world that never was. I pondered this sensation as I walked with my friends to the Banff Centre Library after our cycle of the piece was complete.

Once Upon a Time runs until July 5, 2009 at the Walter Phillips Gallery.