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Jeff
Wall
Marian
Goodman Gallery
24 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019
September
20 - November 2, 2002
CLARE
WEISS writes...
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Jeff Wall Dawn 2001
Edition of 2
Cibachrome transparency, aluminum light box, fluorescent bulbs
96 ½ x 121 ¼ x 10 ¼ inches, courtesy the artist
and Marian Goodman Gallery
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The remnant of an old
suitcase lies open, littered with garbage and filled with rain.
Three strangers walk along an overpass on a partially cloudy day,
carrying luggage. Smoke from a small fire rises through a forest's
bare trees in winter. These are the mundane scenes that Jeff Wall
elevates in his signature style in lightboxes the size of movie
screens, lit up like billboards.
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Wall has been quoted as saying
that it's no longer possible for modern artists to paint like the great
masters. In a way, his photographs put us in mind of the nineteenth-century
European realists whose grand scale anticipated cinema. Wall's lightboxes
impact viewers saturated with the movies and advertising, but what they
get us to look at is the overlooked. Dawn is an 8 by 10 foot vision of
an industrial back street. It's not about ugly subjects so much as overlooked
ones - a dumpster, a rock, telephone poles, electrical wires, shrubbery
and a wire fence. The generic landscape could be New Jersey, it could
be Toronto (the artist is Canadian), but either way you'd never look twice.
Wall focuses on the invisible landscape of everyday objects.
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Jeff Wall After "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison,
the Preface 1999-2001
Edition of 2
Cibachrome transparency, aluminum light box, fluorescent bulbs
76 ¼ x 106 ¼ x 10 ¼ inches, courtesy the artist
and Marian Goodman Gallery
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The centerpiece of the
show is also about invisibility but the subject is anything but
mundane. Wall borrows from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the 1952
novel about a black man's experiences and reflections on his blackness,
for this elaborately staged scene. After the Invisible Man by Ralph
Ellison, The Preface (2001) premiered at Documenta 11 this past
summer. It illustrates the scene from Ellison's novel in which the
book's hero has filled his basement retreat in Harlem with light
- the light of 1,369 light bulbs, according to Wall. Bare light
bulbs, some of them lit and some of them not, cover the ceiling
in giant clusters, creeping down the walls like overgrown foliage.
In the cluttered room the protagonist sits, dressed in an undershirt
and suspenders, with his back to us, while we gawk. It is a spectacle
indeed, a massive, dazzling work with all the big-impact feeling
of a blockbuster movie.
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