28 February–5 April, 2003
Opening Thursday, 27 February, 6–9pm

Since the late 1960's Ian Wallace has utilized, through the medium of photography, the pictorial of the urban street as an abstract construct of lines, signs, structures and crosswalks which conflate to signify critical content. Since 1982 when Wallace first positioned the photograph to canvas, this pictorial "abstraction of meaning" has been paralleled with the painted monochrome. The non-objective surface of pure colour has become, for over two decades now, the artist's marker of a modernist project, which tackles the position of painting and abstraction and its relationship to the prospects of representation.

In this exhibition eight large canvases are the result of a project in Los Angeles, California where the artist utilized the construction site of Frank Gehry's newly designed Walt Disney Concert Hall. This site, which sits across from the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, becomes the formal landscape for which the architect's own modernist project is observed, as is the critical and political character of contemporary high capitalism of an American city. In relation to this site the artist has regarded the city street and structure of the Century City district in LA, inhabited by the individual/s who negotiate their way through the social and geometric landscape of the city's financial center. Both of these landscape sites are read against black and white or specifically coloured monochrome bars which ultimately guides the viewer back to the canvas surface and the modernist history of art.

CJ Press: essay by Barry Schwabsky