Description
The chart is an interactive lineage map. Vancouver School sits at the center, on a timeline that runs from older movements at the top to newer ones at the bottom. The movements that influenced it appear above it, any parallel movements it developed alongside sit on its own row, and the movements it later influenced appear below. Every line is a real, cited connection between two movements: a solid line is an influence historians broadly agree on, and a dashed line is an indirect, parallel, or contested link.
For Vancouver School (1980s – Present), it traces one movement that shaped it, a well-established link: Conceptual art.
The Vancouver School of conceptual or post-conceptual photography (often referred to as photoconceptualism) is a loose term applied to a grouping of artists from Vancouver starting in the 1980s. Critics and curators began writing about artists reacting to both older conceptual art practices and mass media by countering with "photographs of high intensity and complex content that probed, obliquely or directly, the social force of imagery." No formal "school" exists and the grouping remains both informal and often controversial even amongst the artists themselves, who often resist the term. Artists associated with the term include Vikky Alexander, Roy Arden, Ken Lum, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Stan Douglas and Rodney Graham. Read more ↗