The Vancouver School of conceptualPhotography with an eye for social relevance
/ref> or post-conceptual photography (often referred to as photoconceptualismSarah Milroy "Is Arden our next greatest photographer?" ''Globe and Mail'' (October 27, 2007): R1.) is a loose term applied to a grouping of artists from

Vancouver Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...

starting in the 1980s. Critics and curators began writing about artists reacting to both older conceptual art practices and mass media by countering with "photographs of high intensity and complex content that probed, obliquely or directly, the social force of imagery." No formal "

school A school is an educational institution designed to provide learning spaces and learning environments for the teaching of students under the direction of teachers. Most countries have systems of formal education, which is sometimes comp ...

" exists and the grouping remains both informal and often controversialMarsha Lederman "Behind the Lens: The Vancouver School Debate" ''Globe and Mail'' (October 20, 2007): R13. even amongst the artists themselves, who often resist the term. Artists associated with the term include Vikky Alexander,

Roy Arden Roy Arden (born 1957) is a Canadian artist, born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He also creates sculpture from found objects, oil paintings, graphite drawings and collage, and curates and writes on contemporary art. Career Arden gra ...

Ken Lum Kenneth Robert Lum, OC DFA (; born 1956) is a dual citizen Canadian and American academic, painter, photographer, sculptor, and writer. Working in a number of media including painting, sculpture and photography, his art ranges from conceptual i ...

, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Stan Douglas and

Rodney Graham William Rodney Graham (January 16, 1949 – October 22, 2022) was a Canadian visual artist and musician. He was closely associated with the Vancouver School. Early life Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, on January 16, 1949. ...

History

In the early 1980s an attempt at what William Wood refers to as a "re-branding" of Vancouver and a desire for a larger recognition within Canada and internationally, the Vancouver School designation functioned to present Vancouver art to the larger international market.

Key works

Jeff Wall's ''Mimic'' (1982) typifies his cinematographic style and according to art historian

Michael Fried Michael Martin Fried (born April 12, 1939 in New York City) is a modernist art critic and art historian. He studied at Princeton University and Harvard University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford. He is the J.R. Herbert Boone Pr ...

"characteristic of Wall's engagement in his art of the 1980s with social issues". A 198 × 226 cm. colour transparency, it shows a white couple and an Asian man walking towards the camera. The sidewalk, flanked by parked cars and residential and light-industrial buildings, suggests a North American industrial suburb. The woman is wearing red shorts and a white top displaying her midriff; her bearded, unkempt boyfriend wears a denim vest. The Asian man is casual but well-dressed in comparison, in a collared shirt and slacks. As the couple overtake the man, the boyfriend makes an ambiguous but apparently obscene and racist gesture, holding his upraised middle finger close to the corner of his eye, "slanting" his eye in mockery of the Asian man's eyes. The picture resembles a candid shot that captures the moment and its implicit social tensions, but is actually a recreation of an exchange witnessed by the artist. Stan Douglas' 1998

video installation Video installation is a contemporary art form that combines video technology with installation art, making use of all aspects of the surrounding environment to affect the audience. Tracing its origins to the birth of video art in the 1970s, it has ...

''Win, Place or Show'' is shot in the style of the late-1960s CBC drama ''The Client'', noted for its gritty style, long takes and lack of

establishing shots An establishing shot in filmmaking and television production sets up, or establishes, the context for a scene by showing the relationship between its important figures and objects. It is generally a long or extreme-long shot at the beginning of ...

. Set in 1950s Vancouver in the Strathcona redevelopment, the installation explores the modernist notion of urban renewal with the demolition of existing architecture in favour of grids of apartment blocks. Two men share a dormitory room on a rainy day off from their blue-collar jobs. The conversation flares up during a discussion of the day's horse races, and the 6-minute filmed loop is repeated from different angles on a split screen, each cycle presenting ever-changing configurations of point of view. The takes are edited together in real time by a computer during the exhibition, generating an almost endless series of montages. In 1994 Rodney Graham began a series of films and videos in which he himself appears as the principal character: ''Halcion Sleep'' (1994), ''Vexation Island'' (1997) (shown at Canadian pavilion of the 1997

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...

) and ''How I Became a Ramblin’ Man'' (1999). ''The Phonokinetoscope'' (2002) reflects Graham’s engagement both with the origins of cinema and its eventual demise. Graham takes up a prototype by

Thomas Edison Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventi ...

and puts forward an argument for the relation between sound and image in film. In ''Rheinmetall/Victoria 8'' (2003), two increasingly obsolete technologies, the typewriter and film projector, face off against one another—with the latter projecting a film of the former.

References

External links

The Vancouver School in the permanent collection
at

Vancouver Art Gallery The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) is an art museum in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The museum occupies a adjacent to Robson Square in downtown Vancouver, making it the largest art museum in Western Canada by building size. Designed by Franc ...

The Vancouver School: A city's place in the realm of ideas

CBC Radio 3 CBC Radio 3 is a Canadian digital radio station operated by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which plays a relatively freeform mix of indie rock, indie pop, alternative hip hop, folk, country and electronic music. The service, which la ...

Magazine feature p. 18; Commentary with

Daina Augaitis Daina Augaitis is a Canadian curator whose work focuses on contemporary art. From 1996 to 2017, she was the chief curator and associate director of the Vancouver Art Gallery in British Columbia. Career Augaitis received a BES in Honours Geograp ...

, Chief curator of the

Vancouver artists at Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen
, Antwerp,

Belgium Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...

Jeff Wall
at

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

Jeff Wall
at

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery located in London. It houses the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art, and forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It ...

{{Canadianart Canadian art movements

History

Key works

See also

References

Further reading

External links