9 March–14 April, 2001

Ian Wallace's photographic series My Heroes in the Street constructs a criticality based on the relationship of the street and the urban landscape, as well as on the relationship of painting to photography. Wallace has, since the 1970s, worked with the tension posed between painting and photography, examining the monochrome while refusing figurative painting and embracing the factual figurative in photography. This juxtaposition poses a discussion on the future and limits of painting, exemplifying Wallace's role in the development of conceptual art in Vancouver.

Inspired by the active reality of the city as a conceptual phenomenon, Wallace has employed reflections of the street from passing shop windows and rear-view car mirrors, white painted crosswalks in the street, and “heroes” who walk those city cross-walks and sidewalks, finding an abstract geometry within the photograph. From this geometry the artist has seen a place for monochrome painting to find meaning, and successfully juxtaposes photography and painting in these works. “The incorporation of modernist abstraction within photographic representation reconciles these two modalities, i.e. the technical polarity between abstraction and the photographic image which signifies the limits of the real.” (Christos Dikeakos, VAG catalogue 1988).

During the 1970s the monochrome could be found within the photographic subject of Wallace's work, where dense walls or structures within the urban landscape could be viewed as if a primed canvas. Since 1980, Wallace has interwoven this photographic practice back into the ground of painting, where the representational critique of the street directly confronts the non-objective monochrome. The My Heroes in the Street project, originally shot in 1986, consists of ten works, seven of which will be shown in this current exhibition at Catriona Jeffries Gallery including the last ones of the series to be made. This project has been one of great significance for Wallace in the initial tension derived from painting and photography, from the postulations on the notion of the hero (modernist or otherwise), and the relationship to the urban location and existence. “The recuperation of an historical ideality within the terms of modernity requires a re-examination of the concept of individual will…” (VAG 1988 catalogue).