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Jeff Wall
Jeff Wallis an artist best known for his large-scale backlit transparencies and art-historical writing. Wall has been a key figure in Vancouver’s art scene since the early 1970s. Early in his career he helped define the Vancouver School and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, and Ian Wallace. His photographic tableaux often take Vancouver’s mixture of natural beauty, urban decay, and postmodern and industrial featurelessness as their backdrop. Wall received his MA from the University of British Columbia in 1970, with a thesis titled “Berlin Dada and the Notion of Context.” That same year, Wall stopped making art. With his wife, Jeannette, a native of England whom he had met as a student in Vancouver, and their two young sons, he moved to London to do postgraduate work at the Courtauld Institute from 1970 to 1973. Wall was assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1974–75), associate professor at Simon Fraser University (1976–87), and taught for many years at the University of British Columbia. He has published essays on Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Roy Arden, Ken Lum, Stephan Balkenhol, On Kawara, and other contemporary artists. Wall experimented with conceptual art while an undergraduate student at UBC. Then he made no art until he produced his first backlit phototransparencyThe Destroyed Room in 1978. Many of these pictures are staged and refer to the history of art and philosophical problems of representation. The photographs’ compositions often allude to historical artists like Diego Velázquez, Hokusai, Marrcel Duchamp, and ÉdouardManet, or to writers such as Franz Kafka, Yukio Mishima, and Ralph Ellison.