BRITISH COLUMBIA AND U.S. ARMS

Lynda Morris, curator of the Norwich Gallery and director of EASTinternational, will be giving a talk on BRITISH COLUMBIA AND U.S. ARMS.

‘In 1994 John Roberts organised an exhibition for the Norwich Gallery "Renegotiations: Class, Photography and Modernism". It included a photograph by Jeff Wall, "The Arrest" an image worthy of Carravagio of the arrest of a latino man by two City of Vancouver policemen. The picture had homo-erotic overtones as one of the policemen searched the small jeans pocket for drugs.
It is not often as a curator that a work gets better and better each day and becomes an imaginative part of one's consciousness. This did, and 18 months later I found a way to travel to Vancouver and began a correspondence with Jeff Wall.
Vancouver is an extraordinary city, part Bournemouth, part Athens, "British Columbia", and a 100 miles from Seattle. 40% Asian and a centre for Chinese culture in the West, where an "old building" is one built in 1920s. As Wall's work shows, it has a drugs problem and a related homeless problem. Skid Row in Vancouver was something I had not seen since the Bowery in 1973.

And in Vancouver I gradually discovered that the business of the West Coast of the USA and Canada is not only Hollywood but also War, Boeing, Microsoft et al. These issues are at the heart of Wall's work and his teaching in Vancouver, which was probably the most innovative teaching of the late 1980s and early 1990s.’

Lynda Morris 2005

Lynda Morris is curator of the Norwich Gallery, Norwich School of Art and Design, and director of EASTinternational.

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