Painting After Poverty

Painting After Poverty brings together works by Arabella Campbell, Neil Campbell, Ron Terada and Ian Wallace in order to consider the nature and status of painting in Vancouver after Ian Wallace's Poverty work of 1980–82.

Following a decade of large-scale photo-based works, the Poverty project culminated in 1982 in a series of canvases that marked Wallace's return to painting. Each painting positioned a staged photographic image of an urban scene rigged with documentary, Depression-era ambiance against a painted, non-objective monochrome, thereby critically condensing the representational polemicism that aesthetic modernism promoted as avant-garde. Critical to the development of photoconceptual ideas in Vancouver, Poverty anticipated Wallace's concern with the role of the artist in society and the spaces of the studio, the street and the museum. The project leveled documentary photography's non-objectivity alongside painting, and displayed the idealized field of the monochrome within the real, ideologically inflected conditions of its making.

In this exhibition, Poverty provides a historical context for paintings by Arabella Campell, Neil Campbell, Ron Terada and Ian Wallace. In a series of works by Arabella Campbell, the artist's reconsideration of what is held to be peripheral to a work of art surfaces in her attempt to calibrate from memory the precise shade of white paint used by three art institutions upon their walls. Neil Campbell exactly fits his phenomenological abstract paintings to the space of the gallery so as to physically address the body of the viewer and disrupt any straightforward encounter with the architecture. Two Ad Paintings by Ron Terada restore the discursive traces of two exhibitions from an art magazine's advertising section to the gallery. Finally, Ian Wallace returns to urban figures and the intersections they inhabit with a group of street works that includes In the Street, Rodney (1986–2005).

Pressetext

Painting After Poverty
Arabella Campbell, Neil Campbell, Ron Terada, Ian Wallace