Culture - The Art Of The Matter

Art dealer Catriona Jeffries is clad in black from her shoes to the frames of her glasses. Her assistant, Arabella, is dressed accordingly. And so, by chance, am I. Taken together, we could suck the colour from an orange.

Jeffries is working the phones in her gallery office when I arrive. “Well, you know Jeff,” she is saying. “You know Stan. You know Rodney. You know Ken.” Like supermodels and celebrities, the Vancouver photo-conceptual artists who rose to international fame in the 1980s are identifiable by their first names. Even the occasional gallery-goer, clutching her plastic goblet of white wine, will recognize that Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham and Ken Lum, plus Roy Arden, Ian Wallace and Iain Baxter of the N.E. Thing Company, are responsible for the city’s most significant contribution to global arts and culture: the Vancouver School, as their photobased art practice is collectively known.

Coming on the heels of the Vancouver School, a new generation of Vancouver-based artists has emerged onto the international scene over the past several years. Visiting curators and critics comment on the extraordinary wealth of talent in this city. Much of it revolves around two important “moments” happening — at Catriona Jeffries Gallery and Monte Clark Gallery, both situated on South Granville.

Jeffries, a Vancouver native who admits to having a “grotesque amount of ambition,” has been instrumental in propelling the international careers of the artists she represents. Jeffries is one of only two Canadian dealers selected to attend Artforum Berlin, a juried art fair devoted to living artists. Her stable of artists, largely conceptual or idea-based (in other words, you won’t be putting their work above the sofa), includes Ron Terada, Damian Moppett, Geoffrey Farmer, Brian Jungen, Myfanwy MacLeod, Kelly Wood and Alex Morrison — names that are echoing from gallery walls across Europe and the United States. When people say they are “collecting Vancouver” — and a growing number of international collectors are — it usually means they’ve been talking to Jeffries.

Unless they’ve been talking to Monte Clark. An impassioned collector himself, the ebullient, boyish Clark (who wears not black but fuchsia at our meeting) has been representing second- and thirdgeneration Vancouver School artists for the past five years—names like Roy Arden, Howard Ursuliak, Karin Bubas, Evan Lee, Stephen Waddell, Scott McFarland and Chris Gergley. For the opening of Monte Clark’s second gallery space in Toronto in 2001 (for once, a branch plant moves east), Jeff Wall, the acknowledged father of photo-conceptualism and Canada’s foremost living artist, contributed four works.

Surveying the vast terrain of new art in Vancouver, it was with reluctance that we limited our list of artists with growing international reputations to four. Scott McFarland, Geoffrey Farmer, Brian Jungen and Myfanwy MacLeod can’t be grouped by the nature of their work—McFarland, whose practice is photobased, is closest to the Vancouver School, while the other three incorporate Pop Art and conceptual strategies that owe nothing but ambition and professionalism to the photo-conceptualists. What binds them is a certain lightness of touch and their success in a field with a notoriously high drop-out rate. As with actors or writers, the definition of success in the art world is being able to quit your day job. This new generation of artists is doing what their peers became CGAs to do: buying houses, travelling to New York and London and forgoing the traditional route of starving in their garrets. In short, they are making art that has the world taking notice.

SCOTT MCFARLAND

At 30, McFarland may be antihype, but he’s getting his share anyway. Referring to the Essor Gallery staging his solo show in London in 2002, he says, “It wasn’t a bad thing.” About Jeff Wall selecting him as an artist bringing in the 21st century for a Globe and Mail millennial arts segment: “It wasn’t a bad thing.” Wall described McFarland’s work as having “a certain reticence,” and so does the artist, an unusual quality in an arena that’s all about being noticed.

McFarland studied fine art at UBC under Jeff Wall and Roy Arden; he’s currently at work on a series of photos taken inside the photo lab and is best known for his cabin series, and his ongoing photographs of gardens on Vancouver’s west side.

All of the garden photos are taken on private property. Some are abandoned properties, their gardens overgrown and vaguely menacing; others are manicured estates where he requests the owner’s permission to photograph. Not every estate owner welcomes the scrutiny of the camera lens. “I have a 25 percent turn-down rate,” he says. “Zero percent kicked-off, though.”

GEOFFREY FARMER

Farmer, 38, has spent the morning making renovations to his new home in Strathcona. He leaves next week for the National Gallery where he will install a large white truck trailer, part of an installation entitled The Blacking Factory. The trailer, which has toured the U.K., mimics the ubiquitous movie trailers that transport props for the local film industry.

The installation is a departure from Farmer’s previous work. The 2003 recipient of the VIVA Award, a $10,000 prize for achievement in the visual arts, is best known for his idiosyncratic inventories of objects, such as The Hunchback Kit, an eclectic collection of objects related to The Hunchback of Notre Dame. His do-it-yourself alleyway kit comes complete with glass bottles, cigarette butts and garbage. One such exhibit was swept away by an overzealous janitor who didn’t recognize that what he was seeing was “art,” so Farmer now makes a practice of leaving detailed instructions for the cleaning staff “so that they can distinguish the art from something somebody may have forgotten and left behind.”

BRIAN JUNGEN

A member of the Doig River band from B.C., Jungen is of First Nations and European heritage, and one of the most talked-about young artists in Canada. To say his work emanates from questions of identity is as simplistic as saying his series of Northwest aboriginal masks, made from reconstructed Nike Air Jordan trainers, are about the commodification and colonization of culture.

His masks are both elegant and profound, as is the 50-foot Bowhead whale skeleton he constructed from white plastic folding chairs for his Cetology exhibit in 2002. His materials are the staples of mass culture, the consumer goods produced by anonymous Third World labourers to feed the insatiable West. The unseen faces behind the masks are theirs—and ours. The Bowhead whale, an endangered species, will no doubt be survived by millions of moulded plastic chairs.

During the Hammertown exhibit in Edinburgh, Jungen’s Beer Cooler played similar tricks. A polystyrene cooler filled with Budweiser is carved with fire, skulls, eagle, spiderweb, goat, dreamcatcher, phoenix. A liquid potlatch. “It was a gift,” Jungen told Canadian Art magazine. “I was giving alcohol back to Europeans.”

MYFANWY MACLEOD

Myfanwy (pronounced mi-FAWN-way) was named by her English mother for “a Welsh country girl who became an opera singer,” and she has managed to do something almost as unusual for a Canadian with a Catholic girls’ school education. Born in 1961, MacLeod has lived in Vancouver since 1992, when she arrived from Toronto to begin graduate studies at UBC with Jeff Wall. She soon won a residency at the prestigious École des Beaux- Arts in Paris, where she found herself confronted with the “idea of the clichéd North American that seemed to follow you around like a shadow.” Rather than fight the brash stereotype, she responded by making Gum Table, a piece that involved chewing 2,000 pieces of strawberry gum and sticking them to the edge of a table. She chewed gum for eight hours a day over the course of a week to complete the project for an exhibition in London. “My dentist told me I’m not allowed to do that again,” she says. “My tooth broke after a thousand pieces.”

One of her most personally satisfying exhibits, A Brief Overview of Personology, used video, sculpture and drawings to comment on the self-help genre. Anecdotes of Modern Art, a new series of drawings exhibited at the 2004 Toronto International Art Fair, offers an absurdist take on artists’ careers and ambitions. When people say Vancouver produces “smart artists,” MacLeod is one of the first examples to come to mind.