Internationally renowned artist Jeff Wall holding first Vancouver show in 14 years
Exhibition, Sunday until March 25 at Chinatown gallery, features three documentary cityscapes from around the Lower Mainland
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Vancouver artist Jeff Wall’s international status is reflected in the galleries where he had solo shows in 2022: Gagosian in Beverly Hills, White Cube Mason’s Yard in London and Galerie Greta Maert in Brussels.
His connection to the Vancouver art scene is reflected in the gallery he’s chosen for his first solo show in 2023: Canton-Sardine in Chinatown.
You may not have heard of it, because it’s a relatively small space (1,000 sq. ft.) in the basement of the Sun Wah Centre at 071-268 Keefer St.
It’s Wall’s first local show since an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2008-09. Asked why he would choose such a small gallery, he said, “They asked me.”
“If people ask me, usually I do it,” said Wall, 76. “I was acquainted with them, Lam (Wong) and Steven (Dragonn), I’ve seen a few exhibitions there. And one day I guess they decided to ask me if I wanted to make a show there. Very simple. It seemed like an interesting thing to do, locally, easy.”
Jeff Wall: Views In and Out of Vancouver opens Saturday at Canton-Sardine and runs until March 25. The gallery is open from noon to 6.m. Wednesday through Saturday.
There are four pictures on display, three cityscapes and one street view from around the Lower Mainland.
One cityscape is around the Second Narrows Bridge in North Vancouver, one is a view of the Fraser River from the old B.C. Pen in New Westminster, and the third is Park Drive in Stanley Park. The street view is “a little detail of a tree near my studio.”
They date from 1987 to 1999, and none has been shown locally before.
“Some of them are now 25 years old,” he said.
“It seemed that these city views that I’d made would probably be the most interesting to a local audience, because they show the city as it not quite is anymore.
“So they have a historic character, because if you go to the places where I photographed — I’ve been there recently, to all of them — you can’t see what I saw then, for various reasons.
“And also because they are cityscapes, and show a lot of space, and they are all lightboxes, I thought in that little room that would sort of explode the walls, create this vast perspective in a very small room. Which could be in itself pretty interesting.”
Wall is known for his large pictures in lightboxes, a process he discovered “almost by accident” in the 1970s.
“I wanted to work bigger than what was conventional photography in the ’60s,” he explains.
“Because in the ’60s what people did in photography was still determined by the idea of the ’30s and ’40s, which was that it was kind of an outgrowth of journalism, and therefore was mostly designed or conceived to be about the size of the production of a page in a book or magazine.
“That was cool, but it wasn’t really the be-all and end-all of what photography could do. And a lot of people were interested in seeing photography in a different way, that was more related to other art forms like painting, where you could actually see it on a wall on another scale, and have a different experience.”
Unfortunately, the colour printing technology of the ’70s didn’t produce great quality.
“I had some disappointments with various kinds of printing, then almost by accident a man at the lab I was working with suggested transparencies,” he said.
“They were being used for advertising, and he suggested I give it a try. So I did, and I liked it. It seemed new. It was not what I was planning, actually, I had no idea of doing it until I looked at this experiment and realized I could make something out of it.
“And even then I wasn’t planning to make it a permanent thing, it was an experiment. But it worked, and I began to figure out how to manage it. So I did it for over 20 years, then I basically decided to move on from that. I haven’t made one for 15, 16 years.”
Wall was born and raised in Vancouver. He received his Masters in Art History at the University of B.C., where he studied from 1964 to 1970. He has lived on the same block in Point Grey “on and off since 1967,” and has “a few buildings” in Japantown that he uses as studios.
His career took off in Europe in the mid-1980s.
“There’s a highly evolved infrastructure for looking at and dealing with new art (there),” he said.
“In different places of the world it’s very strong — parts of America, of course. But in the area between Belgium, Holland, Germany and maybe Switzerland, in that central/western Europe area, it was very highly evolved, with lots of museums, galleries, dealers, writers, etc., audience, collectors, that had been built up since the end of the war.
“And they were very interested in what was going on next. Moreso than other places, particularly the United States and Canada. So artists gravitated to there, because that’s where all the offers were.”
His fellow artists Rodney Graham and Ian Wallace enjoyed similar success in Europe. Local music fans will recall that all three were in one of the great local bands in the punk/new wave era, UJ3RK5.
In fact, Wall did two pictures for a cover for the Vancouver Complication compilation album of local music in 1979. But they weren’t used.
“They weren’t very punk, so I guess they wanted something else,” he said.
Still, the godfather of punk, Iggy Pop, tracked Wall down and asked him to do a portrait of Iggy for his 1999 album Avenue B. Iggy loved his photos, and Wall thought they were “pretty good myself.”
“It was a nice portrait of him, rather more calm than most of his stuff,” said Wall.
“So I thought it made a very nice album cover, although they didn’t do a very good job of printing it, as I remember. It would be interesting if someone made a good old-fashioned 12-inch disc and then printed it nicely on 12 inches.
“In my mind I knew it never would be, because that was the day of CDs. But it would have been nicer to be bigger, the portrait would have been more emphatic and better looking. And the other picture of him moving down the hallway, which was pretty graceful and interesting, would have been better, too.”
But don’t expect Jeff Wall to do any more commercial jobs like that.
“I’d distinguish that from anything I would do otherwise,” he said. “It was something that I did once, I’ll never do it again.”
He is looking to do more documentary photos or cityscapes, though.
“I’m constantly looking around the city here to make those kind of pictures, and weirdly enough I just haven’t been able to find anything that really suits me for quite awhile — 15-plus years,” he said.
“For example, there’s a lot of new towers going up in the city, and also in the suburbs, in Metrotown and on the south slope there. I’ve looked around there quite a lot, because I thought that would be an interesting subject.
“When you fly in from the air to the airport, you can see a pretty striking contrast between the low-slung areas around and these almost abrupt eruptions of verticality. But when you get on the ground it’s hard to find a way of looking at them that works.
“So I have not happened on anything that works as a picture.”
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