Tag Archives: Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall on artifice, actuality and accident — and why he doesn’t make films

Jeff Wall spoke about his work and its influences. (Art Center photo by Juan Posada)

In the Grad Art Seminar series, Jeff Wall spoke candidly about his work and its influences. (Art Center photo by Juan Posada)

Vancouver-born and -based artist Jeff Wall is now living and working part-time in Los Angeles, which is good news for students at Art Center. A capacity crowd filled the L.A. Times Media Center at Hillside Campus last Tuesday night, eager to hear what he had to say.

Jack Bankowsky, who co-curates the popular Grad Art Seminar series with fellow faculty member Walead Beshty, introduced Wall, and reminded the audience of three of his works—opaque black and white prints—that are set in Los Angeles: Citizen (1996), a man lying on the lawn in a public park; 8056 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles (1996), a cinema-turned-synagogue, framed in a circular black vignette; and Office Hallway, Spring Street, Los Angeles (1997), a man in a dimly lit, nondescript hallway.

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Graduate Art Seminar Brings Distinguished Speakers from the International Art World to Art Center

Tuesdays. 7:30 pm. Los Angeles Times Media Center.

Currently underway, the Graduate Art Seminar at Art Center  welcomes internationally recognized artists, critics, art historians, architects, filmmakers and writers to Pasadena to share their insights into the world of contemporary art. The seminar—a core component of Art Center’s Graduate Art program—takes place Tuesday evenings throughout the term and is free and open to the general public.

Carroll Dunham, Tree with Red Flowers 2009. Mixed media on canvas, 75 x 90 inches. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery

Acclaimed Vancouver photographer Jeff Wall launched the series this term, with a roster of distinguished artists to follow, including noted philosopher, theorist and University of Lille professor Thierry de Duve (March 6); City University of New York’s Distinguished Professor Wayne Kostenbaum, the poet and celebrated author of such provocative titles as The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire; Jackie Under My Skin, and the newly released The Anatomy of Harpo Marks; (April 9*), and painter Carroll Dunham, who will speak on the occasion of a survey of his drawings at L.A.s Blum & Poe Gallery(April 17).

The series culminates with a special symposium titled “Changing the World” spearheaded by one of today’s most influential thinkers Alain Badiou (May 19). Badiou will be joined in conversation by noted professors Kenneth Reinhard (UCLA), Nathan Brown (UC Davis) and Jason E. Smith (Art Center).

For a full list of speakers, please visit the Grad Art website.

*Wayne Kostenbaum’s seminar will take place on a Monday

Come Hear Artist Jeff Wall Speak

Tuesday, January 17, 7:30 pm, L.A. Times Media Center

Vancouver-based artist, Jeff Wall (b. 1946), widely recognized for both his pioneering photography and his trenchant writing on the medium and its place in contemporary art, will be speaking at Art Center Tuesday, January 17 at 7:30 pm in the L. A. Times Media Center. The event, sponsored by the Graduate Art program, is open to the entire Art Center community.

Wall has exhibited regularly at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York since 1989, and he has been the subject of numerous museum shows, including a comprehensive 2005 European survey, “Jeff Wall, Photographs 1978-2004,” which opened at the Schaulager Museum, Basel, Switzerland, before traveling in a reduced version to London’s Tate Modern as “Photographs 1978-2004.” “Jeff Wall,” a retrospective organized by New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Art, opened two years later, in 2007, and subsequently traveled to The Art Institute of Chicago. To mark the occasion, MoMA published “Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews,” a collection bringing together 25 years of the artist’s words. This past summer, the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, mounted an exhibition entitled “Jeff Wall: The Crooked Path,” a selection of his own work together with that of a broad range of artists with whom he has felt affinities.

Wall earned his Masters of Arts at the University of British Columbia, where he graduated in 1970 with a thesis entitled: “Berlin Dada and the Notion of Context”. He subsequently traveled to London in pursuit of his doctorate at The Courtland Institute (1970-73), where he studied with noted art historian T.J. Clark. Returning to Canada, Wall served as assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1974-5), and at Simon Frasier University (1976-87), and went on to lecture at the University of British Columbia.

A galvanizing figure in the Canadian art world since the early 1970s, Wall has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2008). In 2006 Wall was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and named an Officer of the Order of Canada the following year.