In The Playroom With The Meticulous Jonathan Hobin

Hobin is thorough, meticulously, and likely to exhaust anybody posing for his elaborately staged photos. This past summer I tagged along as he posed several young children for a photo shoot at the Canadian War Museum. He posed the children this way and that way, over here, over there, looking up, looking down, standing still, jumping, sitting, arm-in-arm, standing apart... The child models bore it stolidly. I was childishly bored (though, in my defence, I wasn’t allowed to jump on the mini trampoline Hobin had brought along).
His apparently limitless eye for detail shows itself in his photographs. His new exhibition, In the Playroom, at the Dale Smith Gallery, is a panoply images that abound with layers and allusions and other call-outs to our times that you may or may not absorb at first glance.
For example, one photo, a play on the death the disgraced TV evangelist and cosmetological freak Tammy Faye Baker, shows a Holy Bible designed by Louis Vuitton — a piercing shot at the Bakers’ lavish and ungodly lifestyle. Only later did I notice the same LV design on the sleeping blinders worn by a pure white teddy bear next to the hospital bed; here is innocence, blinded to, or perhaps by, the earthly greed supposed spiritual leaders.