A Pretentious, Biased and Uneducated Art Review

To the confession: art makes me feel dumb. I don't really understand the different between a really good painting and a poor one. Like everyone else, I like some paintings, and I don't like others. I have some basic concept of technique and composition, but visual art usually makes me feel like I'm going to be exposed for my plebeian tastes.
Poetry used to make me feel the same way. I was nearly 30 before I finally felt that I "got" poetry. A startling confession for an English PhD candidate, I know. Give me a novel or a short story, a play or an essay and I'm a critical fish in water. But poetry... I'm still getting used to it.
And maybe it's because we're all so used to seeing photos, but my visual arts anxieties are somewhat lessened when I'm looking at a photograph. So I'm pretty excited that this month's Cargo & James exhibit is part of the Photopolis Festival. Until the end of October, we will be showing Scott Blackburn's Religious Views by a Non-Religious Person. And you know what? I look at his photos and I think, "I get it..."
And so right now, I'm going to offer a critical review of some of his paintings. Don't judge me if I get it wrong.
My favourite photo is of a Madonna statue from a church in Church Point, NS. The statue is remarkably lifelike, and her eyes are turned to heaven, only Scott has managed to capture her gaze from a downward perspective. As you look at the photo, you feel an uncomfortable sense of voyeurism--like you have somehow got between her gaze and God. In addition, the statue, and its gaze in particular, is uncannily lifelike--I continually forget that I'm looking at a photo of a statue. It's both beautiful and usettling.
Scoot has also taken a composite photo of a church that is falling into ruin; the amazing thing about this photo is that the images suggests iconic heaven-and-hell imagery: beams of sunlight falling through the ruined roof, and darkness showing through the broken floorboards.
Other images expose the often decaying pageantry of religious imagery: beautiful statues feature cracks and faults, and the guilding on haloes is tarnished and rusted.
Okay. I'll stop being so bloody pretentious now. You can trust me when I tell you that tese are beautiful and haunting pictures, or you can come to Cargo & james to see them yourself, and then tell me how utterly wrong I am about them.