A vivid work of art as well as a memento to an era, The Smoking Room, with its walls papered in scrupulously designed collages, consists of thousands of cigarette packages, gold and silver cigarette foil, and ash. To construct it, James Warren Felter travelled over European and American continents, finding and photographing discarded packs: junk caught in drains, on sidewalks, in distpans and on the floors of abandoned rooms. His tenacity is testament to careless littering and material waste, both indicative of the ways in which we use the goods of the earth: all that is left after we have consumed tobacco and paper, is smoke, ash, acrid odour, and tossed containers: possibly also carcinomas, of course.
Even so, at least in the Western world, what a nostalgic trip these once neat containers give us: the morning cigarette, the companionship of smoke and talk, the cigarettes shared by lovers in old films, the puff given to a dying man, the flyer who lights up before mounting his Spitfire. It's all here in The Smoking Room: Camels, Players, Gauloises. Felter turns the whole into art with scissors and paste. And later, still obsessed, he forms his bizarre material into sociological memorabilia of our century in a limited edition of magnificent digital images: In Situ.
Rona Murray, PhD.
September 1, 2000
Victoria, British Columbia,
