Jeff Wall: Inside
To Oct 3
Inside features a selection of Jeff Wall’s lens-based pictures made over the past 30 years, with an emphasis on those produced in the past decade and not previously seen in Vancouver. As one might expect from the title, the pictures are set inside and range from public spaces to private rooms. One might also expect that, given the artist’s “cinematographic” process, where multiple photographs are digitally montaged into a single picture, the material production of the picture remains an “inside” operation, each photo travelling from camera to computer before becoming an object.
The most circulated image in the exhibition is also a highlight. In the Legion (2022) is, first and foremost, a festival of signifiers, some of which align in support of a singular narrative, while others exist to contradict, expand, open the viewer to what might otherwise be called the uncanny. The setting is a Canadian military veterans’ legion, with its wood-panelled walls covered in framed regalia, woodgrain Arborite tables, vinyl-backed chairs and a blood-red wall-to-wall carpet. Of the 12-plus people in this picture, all but three are seated. A man with a blood-encrusted ear is in the middle of a backflip.
On the private side is Pair of interiors (2018), depicting a middle-aged woman and man in nightclothes—she in a pink dressing gown, he in blue pyjamas. They are in a somewhat expensive, beige-coloured hotel suite. In the first picture they are seated closely together on a sofa, with him turned toward her; in the second, she is on another sofa, looking off, while he is to her left, in an overstuffed chair, facing the camera.
