Ian M. Thom. Art BC: Masterworks from British Columbia. Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas McIntyre, 2000: 30-31.

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Ian Wallace

In 1968, Ian Wallace received his Master of Fine Arts in art history, a subject he then taught at the University of British Columbia and at the Vancouver School of Art (later the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design). While writing about the work of many other artists, he has developed and maintained an important career of his own. Since the early 1980s, Wallace has explored a difficult and complex problem: the relationship of photography to painting, and that of both to modernism. The ideas played out in abstract painting of the early years of the twentieth century—works that relied on the relationships of colour and form for their aesthetic purpose rather than narrative—have had an important influence on his ideas about composition and painting.

In common with many artists from British Columbia, Wallace uses photography as the basis of his work, but he never presents the photograph as an end in itself. His images are always elided with something beyond their immediate reference. Thus, what are essentially large scale snapshots have a resonance and force that would be impossible if the images were presented in a straightforward manner. A recurring theme in his work is the position of the individual within the larger framework of the world: the city, the university, nature, the body politic.

Clayoquot Protest (August 9, 1993) is one of Wallace's most ambitious works. In it, he addresses a number of issues: the history of painting or, more specifically, the relevance of painting as a record of historical events; the language of modernist composition; and the intense emotional and political debates that surround ecological issues today. As Wallace himself notes, he set out to explore the continued relevance of large-scale representations of history—in this case, history as it was being lived. In order to create this work, he and his assistant documented the crowd of protesters on a logging road in Clayquot Sound, waiting for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to come and arrest them for civil disobedience. Indeed, some of the people pictured here are probably among those sentenced to jail for their part in the protest. In photographing a period of waiting rather than action, Wallace forces viewers to concentrate on the people involved rather than the activity, to reflect on what has brought this disparate group of men, women and children to this remote corner of Vancouver Island. The brief coalescence of these individuals around an almost imaginary place and a passionately held belief in an idea of nature is the pretext for this work, but Wallace is fully cognizant of the political, ethical and social ramifications of the protest.

The work consists of nine large panels—each a large-scale photographic enlargement with areas printed from plywood. The complete work is based on a photographic panorama shot from left to right. Several of the figures in the first photograph are also present in the second, and some in the second are present in the third. From each of the large photographs, Wallace has removed segments and placed them on successive canvases, so that in order to "see" photograph one, for instance, viewers must look at panels one, two and three and mentally recompose the image.

The third photograph is in black and white, suggesting the traditional photojournalism of newspapers and magazines. Not content with a journalistic presentation, Wallace challenges viewers to really look by isolating elements of the composition, by interrupting the field of vision and by juxtaposing blank, textured information-less printed areas with the rich texture of this human gathering. Ironically, the printed areas utilize plywood, a material created out of the very trees which these protesters want to save.

The presence of the van and the fact of roads indicate the complex dialogues that rage over such an area. The protestors would be unable to get to Clayquot Sound without the roads created by the loggers. Like everyone in the world, the protestors have an uneasy relationship with political issues—environmental and aboriginal—and this uneasy quality is amplified by Wallace's sometimes jarring manipulation of the images. This is a work of great ambition that compels attention. As in the history paintings of the past, particularly those of Jacques-Louis David, the air tingles with anticipation. The moment and the means of expression are perfectly united.