Ian Wallace print – Contact Sheet for L’Après-Midi

Ian Wallace, Contact Sheet for L’Après-Midi, 1977/2012.

Ian Wallace, Contact Sheet for L’Après-Midi, 1977/2012.This Artist Edition was created by Ian Wallace specifically for the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Artist Edition program in relation to his major retrospective Ian Wallace: At the Intersection of Painting and Photography on view at the Gallery from October 27, 2012 to February 24, 2013. Contact Sheet for L’Après-Midi is a black and white silver gelatin contact print created from negatives Wallace shot in 1977 for the works L’Après-Midi and Colours of the Afternoon, which are included in his current exhibition. The work is a series of images depicting a close up of a woman’s face with her eyes closed and her hands pressed against her temples.

The sequence features her hands as they move to cover her face and then focus on just her hands and arms as she washes them in the pebble-filled water. This gesture suggests a moment of revelation or enlightenment; the washing of her hands is a literal cleansing but also suggestive of purity, in keeping with the idea that the subject is experiencing a moment of transformation. During the 1970s, influenced by cinema and wishing to link photography to the discourses of contemporary art, Wallace experimented with sequential imagery. Of his work during this period Wallace has stated that he “…had to go beyond the discrete and singular image that was typical of classical photography, and to gather images into dramatic sequences, directly influenced by cinema, and serial arrangements directly influenced by abstract minimal sculpture, in order to present a compositional logic that emphasized syntax and rhetorical or dramaturgic devices. This was an expanded notion of what I called in 1969 ‘a literature of images.’” Although produced at a much smaller scale, this work relates to Wallace’s large-scale panoramic work of the 70s depicting sequences of images.

Medium: silver gelatin print,
Image size: 27.9 x 35.6 cm,
Edition of 65 + 5 AP's,
Signed and numbered,
Price: $475

This limited Ian Wallace print is available at Vancouver Art Gallery here