Before I entered the gallery, I put on my "anthropologist hat" in order to find larger truths about a tribe I know nothing about. Near the gallery's entrance a line of snowboards hangs from the ceiling, tracing the evolution of boards from the early-1980s to the present. Viewers can see how the modern snowboard changed from an oversized shortened ski to early-1980s canoe-shaped boards to today's long slim boards. There's also a board dating from 1965, proving how wrong I was to think that snowboarding dated only as far back as 1992.

Ami-Core		Color Boogie System

A few steps further into the exhibition, photographs by British Columbia's Dano Pendygrasse depict riders doing acrobatic flips and tricks. The photos bring to mind the fleeting nature of the action. Another print called "Snow 1999", a close-up of powdery snowdrifts, takes my breath away. Photographs by other artists are also displayed, and are equally stunning, the way commercial photography is supposed to be. But the truth is they don't reveal anything more than "Isn't this sick?"

Along the gallery walls hang a number of completed graphic designs destined for use on snowboards. It's interesting to see how designers use media like pencil crayons, pastels, water-based paints, and computers to design images for use on snowboards, which are also displayed. The boards depict the traditional fantastical themes of adolescent boys: attractive women, fearsome looking creatures, abstract hallucinatory designs, and graffiti-style lettering. The rough designs, had they been done as one-offs, might represent folk art of late-20th century snowboard culture in North America. But they're not. They're simply mass-produced designs — nothing terribly unique about that.