Untitled (Breathless)
2000
Ian Wallace
Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless). The work uses collage techniques—it is stapled down and has a thick strip of contact sheet paper taped over it—that convert the media coverage on Godard’s film into a filmic object itself. The black paper enacts a kind of cinematic “jump cut” on the article, while simultaneously drawing attention to the medium of the film, as well as the photograph reproduced in this newspaper article. The composition has a casual and dynamic stylishness to it (as do the movie stars lying in bed), which is contradicted somewhat by the static utilitarian aesthetic of the piece’s construction. The tape and staples hold the more dominant visual elements in place and recall printmaking tools.
British-born and Vancouver-based, Ian Wallace is known for his conceptual art practice and critical writings. Since the mid-1980s, the artist has explored the relationship between documentary photography—often featuring sites of urban development—and abstract monochrome painting, to investigate the characteristics of media-specificity and the limitations of representation.
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© » KADIST
Ian Wallace
1986Wallace says of his Heroes in the Street series, “The street is the site, metaphorically as well as in actuality, of all the forces of society and economics imploded upon the individual, who, moving within the dense forest of symbols of the modern city, can achieve the status of the heroic.” The hero in Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan) is the photoconceptual artist Stan Douglas, who is depicted here (and also included in the Kadist Collection) as an archetypal figure restlessly drifting the streets of the modern world...