Ian Wallace (b.1943, Shoreham, England)

In Poverty Image with Orange, 1987, Ian Wallace (b.1943) juxtaposed what looks like a historical photograph of a street scene beside a flat band of orange acrylic and above a square of beige. Like other works in the Poverty series, the aesthetic arrangement explores the tension between representation and abstraction by reusing a set of staged images Wallace created to represent social issues.  Wallace is a key figure in Vancouver photo-conceptualism and one of Canada’s most internationally celebrated artists.

Born in England but raised in British Columbia, he studied art history and theory at the University of British Columbia (UBC) before turning to Conceptual art in the late 1960s.  As a student, Wallace was involved in many aspects of Vancouver’s artistic scene. Not only did he play music, but he also found some success as a painter and a poet. In the collages, serial installations, and photographic projections that followed, Wallace interrogated the relationships between photography and painting, language, and film.

Wallace’s work often considers the ways in which our experience of the city and its spaces is mediated through photography. In one image from his series Street Reflections, 1970–2007, five black and white prints form a tall, vertical arrangement on the wall. Each image is taken from the same angle, the frame split between a shop window on the right and, on the left, a different moment on the street, reflected in the shop window. In his efforts to explore the power of the image, Wallace began to use large-scale photographic prints in the 1970s, before the practice became widespread in contemporary art. He has also used colour film in addition to the more traditionally artistic black and white as part of a wider engagement with colour that includes hand-colouring of prints and integrating monochromatic blocks of paint alongside photographs, as seen in works such as At the Crosswalk I, 1988.

As a prolific writer and the subject of myriad interviews, essays, and books, Wallace has shaped how we understand postmodern art, Vancouver photo-conceptualism, and his own work.  A professor at UBC and at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design), Wallace influenced several generations of artists, including Jeff Wall (b.1946), Stan Douglas (b.1960), Rodney Graham (1949–2022), and Ken Lum (b.1956).