Quiet color.

JEFF WALL

ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

JUNE 29-SEPTEMBER 23, 2007

Similar to my original reaction to the action-packed lines of Jackson Pollock, I have never been particularly drawn to Jeff Wall's large-scale photographs. In publications, his works lack the presence that they contain in an exhibit such as the recent retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibit amplified his vision, forcing viewers to take a second look into the backlit wonders of a seemingly ordinary location. Colors beckoned with harmonious tones, glistening in their own resonance. With forty-one of his works, including most of his major images, the Art Institute presented an exhibit of sophistication. Viewers lingered with syntactic precision in rooms that emanated the color of silence and gave a comprehensive voice to Wall's lengthy career.

Wall's interest in producing large-scale photographic transparencies mounted in aluminum boxes began in the late 1970s. This retrospective brought attention to his prolific production of the lightboxes that have put him on the photographic map. As one entered the exhibit, lightboxes inhabited the room like large elephants--waiting to be spoken about. People wandered, looking at their own reflections and looking at the photographs. Wall's images are stark yet complex in concept and color. With hints, speckles, and remnants of hues splashed like waves, his quiet color creeps up the walls.

Interestingly enough, his images capture the gestures, postures, and thought processes of those who are combing through these photographic rooms. People are watching people who are watching each other. Wall manages to bring attention to snippets of life and a glimpse of a moment that happens so routinely that few bother to mention it. He is exceptionally skilled at representing people standing still--his photographs capture the feeling of silence. The stillness is loud and quiet at the same time. Apparent, striking, and obvious, the rooms depicted scream with loneliness, stillness, and the solidarity of simultaneous suburbia and city life. People are waiting, standing still, and going--and yet, there isn't any motion in the photographs. Movement is created only in Wall's use of color.

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The colors of Wall's backlit works burst with energy--projecting reds and greens of an unearthly palette. As a forerunner in the contemporary narrative and conceptual photography trend, Wall uses color and lighting as singular units of character in each piece he creates. Light emulates life, and in turn, has a life-like quality that breathes global commonality. While most viewers capture these quiet moments in their heads, Wall increases the saturation of the colors, bringing out a memory of a particular red balloon, a particular field that seemed greener than any other field. It is as if he captures the sense of heightening that we experience when we are in love. With our senses at their maximum, viewers are sensitive to touch, sight, and sound, and leave this exhibition visually exhausted and exhilarated.

Quiet seems to be the new loud in contemporary photography--the act of recreating, recapturing, and mimicking has taken the place of the importance of documenting the decisive moment of previous photographic years. Similar to many of his contemporaries such as Gregory Crewdson and Thomas Demand, Wall's role as photographer includes more than the "simple" snapping of the shutter. Words such as directing, setting, producing, staging, and constructing all come to mind in addition to visualizing and creating. Each large-scale photograph consists of film that is spliced together--seaming and seeming with possibilities that reference the duality between art history and the contemporary photographic world.

Within works such as The Flooded Grave (1998-2000), The Storyteller (1986), Mimic (1982), and his first lightbox work, The Destroyed Room (1978), we can see his interest in duality. The seam of the splicing of the film dances between being obvious and completely obscured; he uses photomontage and the simultaneous, eerie, hyperrealism projected within his images; and crosses and connects the lines between art history and contemporary photography.

Due to his personal interest and travels studying art history, there is an obvious connection between specific historic images and the images that Wall has been making since the late 1970s. The Destroyed Room can be seen in parallel with Eugene Delacroix's seminal The Death of Sardanapalous (1827). Rumpled clothes, personal effects and dilapidated furniture serve as a testimony to the increasing lack of privacy we have in even our most private habitats and echo the violence and destruction seen in Delacroix's vibrant oils. Other works include A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) (1993), which has the same movement and spatial drama of the historic woodblock wave.

The duality between these contemporary constructions and his homage to historical art masters is refreshing. Other photographers underneath this contemporary umbrella of creating tableaus and fictional narratives seem to lack this reference and reverence to history--their scenes often feel empty and void of meaning. Wall's methodology of constructing seems sculptural, painterly, and assemblage-based--perhaps the element of the artist's hand is why so many of us are drawn to this trend. It seems less slick, while at the same time, it retains the clean and modern gloss, shape, and tone of the history of the photograph. With infinite possibilities of seaming and being sewn, these constructions create a space where dreaming within the space of the emulsion can occur.

Although Wall's work is clearly photography about photography, he creates a discourse within the square inch of the photograph. The Art Institute presented this historic exhibition of thirty years of photographic making in the same grandiose, spilling-over light of Wall's projected images and his place in photographic history. The vast scale of his dimensions, as well as the quantity and quality of this exhibition, force us to take another look into Wall's lifetime of images.

KRISTIN MILLER is an artist, writer, educator, and Visual Studies Workshop graduate. She teaches art and art history at Palm Beach Community College and works at Red Dot Contemporary in West Palm Beach, Florida.