Jeff Wall ─ North & West

Jeff Wall has lived in his hometown of Vancouver for all but four years of his life. Most of the images he has created are shot in and around that city, yet his art transcends these local subjects and addresses universal themes of history and memory. That explains why his work is celebrated around the world and has been the subject of countless international exhibitions from the Tate Modern, to MoMa, to the Art Institute of Chicago. His importance to photoconceptualism is recognized throughout the art world and his cinematographic pictures are immensely popular with the public and the academy alike.

The images he has chosen for North and West explore the meaning of history and how we remember the cities we inhabit. The towns imprinted in our minds no longer exist. Urban landscapes constantly change but the remnants of the past remain and history’s influence never ends. North and West is a succinct and indispensable look into the profoundly moving and influential oeuvre of Jeff Wall.

Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific. He also is a frequent contributor to Artforum. In 2012, he was invited to be a participant in Documenta 13 as a writer-in-residence. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he is a lecturer at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Suzanne E. Greening, Executive Director of the Audain Art Museum, has embraced her passion for the arts through a lifelong career in the arts community in Canada and the United States. She has had extensive experience starting up new museum facilities, previously acting as the Director of the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario, the Museum of Glass and Chihuly Bridge of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, and The Reach Gallery Museum in Abbotsford, British Columbia. Suzanne has also been actively involved on cultural and community-based boards such as the Chamber of Commerce, the Glass Art Society, KCTS-9, and Rotary International.

Jeff Wall, OC, was born in 1946 in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he lives and works. He has exhibited his photographs internationally for the past thirty-five years. His pictures, in both black-and-white and color, are usually large in scale and done in collaboration with performers. He calls them cinematographic.” Wall is considered to be one of the artists who has led the way in emphasizing the affinities between photography, painting, and cinema. His work is included in many major public and private collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Tate Modern, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He taught art in universities in Canada for twenty-five years, and his critical writing has been collected and published in several languages. He has been awarded several prizes, including the Hasselblad Award for photography in 2002 and the Roswitha Haftmann Prize in 2003.