Jeff Wall: Views In And Out Of Vancouver

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Jeff Wall, "Views In And Out Of Vancouver"

Courtesy of Canton-sardine.

Opening Reception: Saturday Jan 14, 12-6pm

Jeff Wall: Views In And Out Of Vancouver presents three vintage cityscapes — his classic transparencies in lightboxes — created between 1987 and 1999, a time that now seems almost like another era. The title, ‘Views In And Out Of Vancouver’, points to the fact that two of the three pictures depict other municipalities—North Vancouver, New Westminster, and Surrey. These landmark early documentary pictures are part of an ongoing thread in Wall’s overall practice. He described this direction at the time: ‘I make landscapes, or cityscapes… to study the process of settlement as well as to recognize the other genres that a landscape might conceal within itself.’

Wall’s now five-decade long involvement with image-making has ranged across many subjects and approaches, but he has been insistent in pursuit of real-time observation of the spaces and behaviours of contemporary life in all its often troubling, often exhilarating, complexity and his pictures have become known worldwide for their highly specific and often critical images of Vancouver. Yet most of them have remained out of sight in the city itself for many years. We hope this small selection will begin to reintroduce them to new generations of viewers.

Curated by Lam Wong for Canton-sardine in Vancouver’s Chinatown, Jeff Wall: Views In And Out Of Vancouver marks the first local solo exhibition by the artist since 2009.

About the Artist

Jeff Wall was born in 1946, in Vancouver where he lives and works. His photographs have been exhibited worldwide over the past forty years. His pictures often depict events the artist has witnessed and reconstructed in a process he calls ‘cinematography’. His subject matter ranges from everyday occurrences photographed in real places to imaginary situations constructed in a studio. He is considered to be one of the artists who since the 1970s has led the way in emphasizing the affinities between photography, painting, and cinema. He taught art in universities in Canada for twenty-five years, and his critical writing has been collected and published in several languages. His work has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, most recently at the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland in 2021