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• ↓ Ian Wallace Surface / Structure / Street: Works 1986–2014 September 18–November 7, 2026
• ↓ Chukwudubem Ukaigwe
• ↓ Abbas Akhavan
• ↓ Brian Jungen
• ↓ Elizabeth McIntosh
• ↓ Janice Kerbel
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"A picture begins and ends with its frame. Ian Wallace has spent six decades investigating the ways in which frames condition the perception of their contents. The artist’s work—which typically brings verité photography and minimalist painting strategies together on stretched canvas surfaces—explores the frame as an alternatingly opaque or transparent aspect of an image, structuring a “view through a window into a world in which the illusory image act[s] as a simulation of an imaginary space and subject.”1 But in the time of modernity, these illusory qualities became suspect, and representations were soon analyzed according to their constituent formal elements. Before long, the picture plane itself became an object of scrutiny, and its structural supports were similarly subjected to analysis and critique. Inevitably, this dissection parceled away any distinction between the form and content of an image, instead requiring representations to be considered within a web of infrastructural conditions and social relations. At the same time, society itself was becoming increasingly abstract, as dispersed networks and digital interfaces actualized simulatory spaces and elided traditional pictorial description. Wallace notes that this arc of art history, whereby representations oscillated between material and metaphoric realities, led him to reconsider the expressive potential of painting as a model for photography. “When the self-reflexive aesthetic issues implicit in modernist abstract painting are applied to photography, the question of framing becomes paramount.”2 In the works on view in Surface / Structure / Street: Works 1986–2014, we are given pictorial examples of frames represented by bare canvas stretchers, skyscrapers with steel skeletons, and multicellular glass grids, as well as the delineations of architectural sightlines, traffic lines, and city skylines, all underscored by Wallace’s characteristic montage of images surrounded by blocks of colour on canvas. When the framework is complete, it becomes a support structure for the picture plane. We see the wooden stretchers sheathed in canvas, the skeletal buildings clad in glass. The frame is not just a pictorial crop, but the delineating condition for its imaginary space and subject. Wallace writes that “the wall functions as a screen for a sequence of pictures and thus constructs what is, in effect, a text of images.”3 The buildings of New York, Paris, and Los Angeles which appear throughout this exhibition rise as walls par excellence—the windows that frame godlike views of the surrounding metropolises are impenetrable from the outside. What is written upon their surfaces? What can be read within the picture frame of a city skyline? Prior bodies of work focused on New York’s Times Square or Toronto’s Financial District as sites in which the architecture—either spectacularly overloaded in advertisements, or so sleek and mirrorlike as to become completely opaque—functioned as metonymic glimpses of modernism, capitalism, and the social superstructure which defines our contemporary condition. We can see urban architecture function as more than a site for shelter or business, becoming an imagistic text that conveys and withholds in equal measure. “The image of the street provides a metaphor for society at large, a framework or support for a political interpretation of pictorial material.”4 The street is the ground condition for these towers: the point of passage between them and the commonplace beyond. Yet in Clayoquot Protest (August 9, 1993) (1993), a logging road replaces the street as a theatre of public action."

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Ian Wallace Surface / Structure / Street: Works 1986–2014 September 18–November 7, 2026

Chukwudubem Ukaigwe

Abbas Akhavan

Brian Jungen

Elizabeth McIntosh

Janice Kerbel