傑夫·沃爾

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Berlin, Johnen Galerie, Jeff Wall, April - May 2007 (edition no. unknown) 

London, White Cube, Jeff Wall, November 2007 - January 2008 (edition no. unknown)

New York, Marian Goodman Gallery, Jeff Wall, February - March 2008 

Mexico City, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Jeff Wall, June - September 2008, illustrated in colour (front cover)

San Francisco, de Young Museum, Real to Real, June - September 2012, n.p.,
no. 69, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Executed in 2007, the same year as Jeff Wall’s critically acclaimed touring retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Church, Carolina St, Vancouver radiates with the confidence of an artist at the absolute height of their artistic powers. Enlarged to an imposing scale and possessing a complexity that rivals historical salon painting, the present work is characteristic of the artist’s meticulous and innovative photographic method. Depicting an unassuming suburban Pentecostal church swathed in a sumptuous blanket of fresh snow on the corner of Carolina Street in Vancouver, the present work is the perfect example of the artist’s infamous ‘near-documentary’ light boxes. Wall’s works are typified by two approaches, which he characterises as either cinematographic or, as exemplified by the present work, 'near-documentary'. In this epoch-defining approach, Wall utterly exemplifies the Modernist dictum that the medium should surrender its claims to complete truth by unhinging photography’s intrinsically documentary status. These pictures may be restagings of events that Wall has experienced or they may be documentary photographs that involved a small degree of intervention by the artist. The resulting pictures, like Church, Carolina St, Vancouver occupy this innovative and endlessly intriguing middle ground between fiction and documentary.

Famously, Wall happened upon the idea for his backlit photographs having seen an illuminated advert at a bus stop. As the artist recalls, “I just kept seeing these things at the bus terminals and it just clicked that those backlit pictures might be a way of doing photography that would somehow connect those elements of scale and the body that were important to Donald Judd and Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock, as well as Velázquez, Goya, Titian or Manet” (Jeff Wall cited in: Craig Burnett, Jeff Wall, London 2005, p. 9). Although Wall’s technique arose from the simple concept of an illuminated advertisement, the idea itself deals with notions that are much more complex than simple imitation.

The 'near-documentary' pictures, those of still-lifes and landscapes, should be understood as in the documentary style but not entirely as objective images. Wall’s goal in doing so, is not to create a document in the traditional sense but to provide his own subjective point of view, through a documentary mode of expression. Therefore, the resulting images do not classically replicate their subject but instead formulate a personal response to reality, turning his gaze to the poetics of a place. Wall’s conceptual practice leaves behind street photography’s aim of aesthetically perfecting a documentary picture. The photos of Robert Frank or Henri Cartier-Bresson, while visually compelling, were perceived by Wall to lack the modernist self-awareness, and self-critique, associated with avant-garde practice. As the artist has described of these 'near-documentary' pictures: "I think of my work as sober, but I don't find it sad or melancholy… I try to contemplate things that happen, whatever they happen to be. And I like to work with commonplace material because I think there's nothing as complicated as the commonplace. It's magical to be able to make a picture that imparts a strong aesthetic experience in spite of unprepossessing subject matter. It's much more interesting to conjure something out of nothing" (Jeff Wall cited in: Alistair Sooke, ‘Jeff Wall: Conjuring something out of nothing’, The Telegraph, 1 December 2007, online).  Magisterial and conceptually complex, Church, Carolina St, Vancouver, Winter is a powerful example of the artist’s pioneering and thought-provoking near-documentary style.