Pioneering photo-conceptualist Ian Wallace wins one among Canada’s prime artwork prizes
Ian Wallace, the Vancouver-based picture conceptualist, was awarded the Audain Prize for the Visible Arts in the present day (29 September), one of many prime awards for Canadian up to date artists, throughout a luncheon on the Fairmont Lodge Vancouver. The prize, which was based by the collector Michael Audain and his spouse Yoshi Kurosowa and is given yearly to an artist based mostly within the westernmost province of British Columbia, comes with C$100,000 (about $73,000) money. Final yr’s recipient was sculptor James Hart (7idansuu), the hereditary chief of the Eagle Clan of the Haida Nation.
Wallace, 79, is just not solely an award-winning artist in his personal proper—exploring and juxtaposing the boundaries of monochrome portray and pictures whereas referencing aesthetic and social points through the themes of the studio, the museum and the road—he’s additionally a champion of up to date artwork. He was an early proponent of incorporating the artwork of the latest previous, together with movie, pictures and up to date portray, into the artwork historical past curriculum.
Thought-about by many to be the progenitor of the Vancouver College of photo-conceptualism, whose practitioners embrace his former college students Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham and Jeff Wall (all previous recipients of the Audain Award, established in 2004), Wallace influenced a era of artists by way of his teachings on the College of British Columbia and Emily Carr College.
Ian Wallace, Masculine Feminin sequence (2012) Courtesy the artist
“All of the earlier recipients are wonderful artists—and I’m actually joyful to be on that listing,” Wallace says. “My appreciation to Michael Audain and Yoshi Kurosowa (his spouse) for his or her assist of the visible arts and to the jury who determined that my lifelong endeavours have been worthy of the prize.”
Wallace’s many honours embrace a Governor Basic’s Awards in Visible and Media Arts in 2004, turning into an officer of the Order of Canada in December 2012 and being inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2016. His work has been exhibited regionally—notably on the Vancouver Artwork Gallery, which held the 2012 retrospective Ian Wallace: On the Intersection of Portray and Pictures—and internationally, with seminal works like 1993’s Clayoquot Protest documenting the struggle to save lots of British Columbia’s pristine previous progress forests being exhibited on the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany in 1998. His newest exhibition, Within the Museum, debuted at Galerie Greta Meert in Brussels in Could of this yr.
“I’m on the studio seven days every week,” Wallace says, “caring for enterprise, making an attempt to get my work out into the world and archiving what I’ve carried out to date.” In the mean time, this consists of compiling a ebook of over 500 printed essays.
Ian Wallace, Lodge Rivoli (22 November 2003) III, 2012 Courtesy the artist
Wallace is at the moment at work reprising a bit from 5 many years in the past referred to as Intersection 1970 that encapsulates the trajectory of Vancouver and his personal profession. The unique model was a black-and-white {photograph} of the nook of Hastings and Seymour streets in downtown Vancouver, together with his studio within the background, in a constructing that has since been torn down. “That is the character of the fashionable metropolis” says Wallace. “Simply have a look at nineteenth century Paris that was torn down and rebuilt.”
Within the new color picture of the intersection, the Wosk Centre for Dialogue (a part of Simon Fraser College’s downtown campus) stands rather than a former financial institution. As a lot of Vancouver’s cityscape shapeshifts into high-density high-rise buildings, Wallace’s work speaks to each the specificity of this place and to the photo-conceptualist model it exported internationally. It’s a relentless reminder that artwork historical past is unfolding in actual time.
Wallace, together with his physique of labor located on the intersections of portray and pictures, biography and place, Vancouver and the world, is a deserving and well timed recipient of one among Canada’s prime creative honours.
