Visions of mystery

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Photograph­er Charlie McDougall amid his subject, the Manitoba Legislature.

You've read the book. You've taken the tour. Maybe you've even audited the course.

Now you can see the art photography show. Mystery and Magic at the Legislature, which opens a week from tonight at 7 p.m. in the Exchange District gallery Cre8ery, focuses on the alleged occult roots of Manitoba's capitol building.

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The Rotunda

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The front of the Legislature at evening and a shot of the Rotunda (above) are included in McDougall’s show.

Winnipeg photographer Charlie McDougall is an acolyte of local architectural historian Frank Albo, who claims to have discovered the 1920 structure's Masonic symbolism and who inspired the 2007 Free Press tome The Hermetic Code.

"I had photographed the building for several years," says McDougall, whose day job with the provincial cabinet communications team has him working inside the Legislative Building. "But his ideas breathed new life into my work and compelled me to take on the project with fresh eyes."

McDougall's solo exhibition consists of 23 digitally shot and float-mounted images, predominantly in colour. Most are 16 by 20 inches (and sell for $120) but a few are panoramas at 16 by 40 inches (which go for $200).

All picture some aspect of the legislature's Masonic iconography, from the hieroglyphic inscriptions and numerological codes engraved in the Tyndall stone walls to the signature statue of the Golden Boy, supposedly modelled on the Greek god Hermes.

"They're stunning," Albo says. "Charlie provides a visual portrait of the building as designed by the architect as a magnum opus of western esoteric thought."

To capture his images, McDougall set his Canon EOS 5D digital camera on a tripod. Then he'd snap away, taking as many as 200 separate exposures.

With the various exposures loaded into his computer, he used the design program Photoshop to stitch them into one seamless and information-heavy image.

He prints with special metallic ink. "This gives them added sharpness," McDougall says. "The idea is to make them gleam like the gold-leaf Renaissance paintings one finds in Florence."

McDougall, 38, comes to art photography via a circuitous route. He grew up on a farm on Lake Huron's Manitoulin Island in northeastern Ontario and studied journalism in community college.

In his first reporting job at a small-town Ontario newspaper, he was handed a camera. He discovered he enjoyed taking pictures as much as he did writing, editing and laying out stories.

He came to Manitoba in 1993 for a reporting job at the Dauphin Herald. He moved to Flin Flon, and then Thunder Bay in northwestern Ontario, before coming back here in 1999 as a copy editor at the Winnipeg Sun.

In 2003 he was hired as a press secretary by the provincial NDP, for whom he still works. By this time, however, he had bought a digital camera and had been experimenting with artistic rather than journalistic photography.

He has enjoyed taking nature pictures, especially of flowers. These he has displayed and sold at Gallery Lacosse and at a friend's hair salon.

"I try to capture natural beauty," McDougall says. "There's a relationship between flowers and the architecture of the (legislature) in that both involve what's called 'sacred geometry.'"

McDougall is somewhat of a relentless self-improver. Besides his photography passion, he's taking a degree in politics and history at the University of Winnipeg, where he took Albo's course in "western esotericism."

McDougall admits that not all the politicians he works with buy into Albo's Masonic interpretation of the legislature's history.

Even some Masons are unconvinced. Victor Popow is the former grand librarian of the 3,000-strong Grand Lodge of Manitoba Freemasons. In his view, the legislature's architect, Frank Worthington Simon, was working with archetypes the predate the Masons' 800-year history.

"(The building) is and isn't a Masonic temple," says Popow, who has been displaying his acrylic paintings on Masonic themes this month at the Framing & Art Centre on Meadowood Drive in St. Vital.

"The Masons inherited a lot of their ideas from the ancient Romans and Egyptians. These are old and universal themes."

Be that as it may, McDougall is confident he'll get a crowd of contemporary New Democrats at his exhibition opening, including some cabinet ministers.

In spirit, he may even have former premier Gary Doer. A couple of years ago, Doer expressed admiration for McDougall's front view of the building at night. So McDougall gave it to him as a Christmas present. Doer resigned the following August.

"He took it with him to Washington," McDougall says. "I'm going to be there in October, and he told me to stop by his office. I want to see my picture on his wall."

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca

ArtPreview

Mystery and Magic

at the Legislature

. Photography by Charlie McDougall

. Cre8tery, 125 Adelaide St.

. Sept. 2

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 26, 2010 D1