PHOTO:Pictures From Here
The term “Vancouver School of photography” has been used to describe a group of artists from Vancouver whose work is based in photo-conceptual practices (and who often photograph the city itself). Starting in the ‘80s, art critics and curators began to notice a number of Vancouver artists reacting to conceptual art’s downgrading of visual values with photographs of high intensity and complex content that probed, obliquely or directly, the social force of imagery.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Vancouver Art Gallery Archive
The group exhibition “Pictures From Here” at the Vancouver Art Gallery presents photographs and video works by Vancouver-based artists that date from the late ‘50s to the present. The photos are from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Collection and from private collections. The exhibition reflects the development of the innovative lens- based practices that emerged as a counter- point to the lyrical landscape tradition that dominated art making in this city well into the ‘70s. At that time, Vancouver-based artists such as Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall and Christos Dikeakos adopted intellectually rigorous approaches to photography that both articulated an affinity with the challenges to tradition put forward by the modernist avant-garde and acknowledged the place in which they were working. Focusing on representations of the city and its surrounds, the exhibition acknowledges the legacy of the innovative approaches to photography developed in Vancouver, while also emphasizing the diverse range of interests and socially engaged practices that have informed lens-based art in the city over the past four decades. The exhibition include Rodney Graham’s monumental light-box “Paddler, Mouth of the Seymour” (2012-13). The large three panel light-box is based on a painting known as “Max Schmidt in A Single Scull” (1871) by the American Realist Thomas Eakins. Graham adapts the original painting to a contemporary setting, playing Schmidt as a contemporary kayaker on a break. The work forms part of a series of works depicting the classic theme of the Four Seasons and represents Autumn. Christos Dikeakos moved to Vancouver in 1956, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia in 1970. Working primarily in photography and text his photos like “Firewood, Alert Bay” (2010), speak to the transformation of land use and the spiritual dimensions of nature, both of which inform Indigenous cultural beliefs. In Jeff Wall’s work “Monologue” (2013) three middle-aged men are in a back garden, two of them seated, one standing, it takes place under a large lamp, with a tree behind each of them. The scenery is controlled by him down to the last detail, it was shot in his studio, and with that information one perhaps better understands the definite feeling of something ‘artificial’ in the work: this is real, it actually exists in the world, but it is not what we understand by documentation. Penner Bancroft’s “spiritland/Octopus Books Fourth Avenue“ (1987) is a panorama, comprising five unframed silver-gelatin prints, re-interrogates the place of public civic memory. The work depicts the now-defunct business, Octopus Books, an alternative left bookstore on Fourth Avenue now relegated to an empty lot. One of Canada’s most significant artists, Ian Wallace has played a fundamental role in the development of contemporary art since the late 1960s by bringing together two great image-making traditions, painting and photography, in works like “At the Crosswalk VII” (2011) that is on show in the exhibition On Presentation are works by: Roy Arden, Karin Bubaš, Christos Dikeakos, Stan Douglas, Greg Girard, Rodney Graham, Mike Grill, Arni Haraldsson, Fred Herzog, Barrie Jones, Evan Lee, N.E. Thing Co., Marian Penner Bancroft, Henri Robideau, Sandra Semchuk and James Nicholas, Althea Thauberger, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Paul Wong , Cornelia Wyngaarden and Andrea Fatona.
Info: Curator: Grant Arnold, Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, Duration: 19/5-4/9/17, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 10:00-17:00, Tue 10:00-21:00, http://vanartgallery.bc.ca
