Jeff Wall

Early views of Vancouver prompt reflection on changing times.

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Jeff Wall is one of Canada’s most famous artists – a man feted by major international galleries and renowned for his innovations in presenting large-scale cinematic photographs. So, it seems odd his first show in Vancouver in 14 years is in a basement gallery in Chinatown.

Once you make your way past the paper cut-outs of doe-eyed rabbits holding oranges and wind through a snaking subterranean hallway, you come to Canton-sardine, squeezed, as its name suggests, into tight confines. 

Wall’s exhibition, Views In and Out of Vancouver, which continues to March 25, is, by necessity, minimal. He presents four lightboxes – backlit photographs printed on transparencies, an innovative technique he launched into the art world. Three images show various views of Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, while the fourth is a street view. They date from the 1980s and 1990s.

By then, Wall, who grew up in Vancouver and earned a master’s degree in art history at UBC, was already drawing attention in Europe. His reputation continued to grow exponentially in the years that followed. Wall, represented by the global mega-gallery Gagosian, has a 2024 retrospective at Switzerland’s Fondation Beyeler. He is no stranger to significant solo presentations – he has shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among many others.

Curator Lam Wong says the exhibition is the result of years of building trust and goodwill. Remember, Wall is the artist who pulled out of a major solo exhibition for the opening of the Audain Art Museum in Whistler in 2016. That show, North & West, was cancelled so late that the accompanying publication had already been printed. Prior to that, Wall’s last show in British Columbia was in 2008 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Wong met Wall through mutual friends about four years ago. Wong says he suggested working on an exhibition together but Wall declined, although he came to openings at Canton-sardine and they got to know each other, bonding over a shared love for tea. Last year, Wong asked again, and Wall agreed, deciding he wanted to reprint older works using technology not available when he first made them. 

Capturing regional imagery has been central to Wall’s practice since the late 1960s, when he produced Landscape Manual, a series of photos taken from his car window that trace the rapidly expanding city. While those images present places now virtually unrecognizable, the  images in this show look much like Vancouver today.

Challenging the notion of landscape photography, Clipped Branches, East Cordova Street, Vancouver, captures an urban tree planted in a cut-out section of sidewalk. The image narrows in on the base of the tree, where thin, clipped-down branches cradle a discarded foil wrapper. The tree could be considered emblematic of efforts to contain and control unruly nature in the region’s temperate rainforest climate.

The collision between nature and human activity is also apparent in Coastal Motif. Framed between fogged-out mountains and a treed foreground, a bleak lumber mill is a reminder of our complex relationship with forestry, the province’s major resource industry. 

While Wall’s images offer recognizable views, they also allow us to reflect on what has changed over the last few decades. The city has become a harsher place with radical chasms between opulent wealth and desperate poverty. Major social issues – a shocking lack of affordable housing and record-breaking deaths from toxic street drugs – continue to worsen. In some ways, Wall’s images cast a backward glance to what seems like a simpler time, although, clearly, the roots of present-day challenges are lodged firmly in the past. ■

Jeff Wall: Views In And Out Of Vancouver at Canton-sardine in Vancouver from Jan. 14 to March 25, 2023.

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