Ian Wallace, the Vancouver-based photograph conceptualist, was awarded the Audain Prize for the Visible Arts in the present day (29 September), one of many high awards for Canadian up to date artists, throughout a luncheon on the Fairmont Resort Vancouver. The prize, which was based by the collector Michael Audain and his spouse Yoshi Kurosowa and is given yearly to an artist primarily based within the westernmost province of British Columbia, comes with C$100,000 (about $73,000) money. Final 12 months’s recipient was sculptor James Hart (7idansuu), the hereditary chief of the Eagle Clan of the Haida Nation.
Wallace, 79, just isn’t solely an award-winning artist in his personal proper—exploring and juxtaposing the boundaries of monochrome portray and images whereas referencing aesthetic and social points through the topics of the studio, the museum and the road—he’s additionally a champion of latest artwork. He was an early proponent of incorporating the artwork of the current previous, together with movie, images and up to date portray, into the artwork historical past curriculum.
Thought-about by many to be the progenitor of the Vancouver Faculty of photo-conceptualism, whose practitioners embody his former college students Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham and Jeff Wall (all previous recipients of the Audain Award, established in 2004), Wallace influenced a technology of artists by his teachings on the College of British Columbia and Emily Carr College.
Ian Wallace, Masculine Feminin collection (2012) Courtesy the artist
“All of the earlier recipients are glorious artists—and I’m actually joyful to be on that record,” 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 embody 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 domestically—notably on the Vancouver Artwork Gallery, which held the 2012 retrospective Ian Wallace: On the Intersection of Portray and Images—and internationally, with seminal works like 1993’s Clayoquot Protest documenting the battle to save lots of British Columbia’s pristine previous development 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 Might of this 12 months.
“I’m on the studio seven days every week,” Wallace says, “caring for enterprise, attempting to get my work out into the world and archiving what I’ve accomplished to this point.” For the time being, this consists of compiling a ebook of over 500 revealed essays.
Ian Wallace, Resort Rivoli (22 November 2003) III, 2012 Courtesy the artist
Wallace is at present at work reprising a bit from 5 many years in the past known 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 trendy metropolis” says Wallace. “Simply take 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 instead of 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 fashion it exported internationally. It’s a continuing reminder that artwork historical past is unfolding in actual time.
Wallace and his physique of labor, located on the intersections of portray and images, biography and place, Vancouver and the world, appear worthy recipients of Canada’s high inventive honours.
