um apartamento

Jeff Wall, View from an apartment, 2005.
© Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall owns a complex of studios in one of the oldest neighbourhoods of Vancouver. His workspace is in an area of this far-western Canadian city where the frontier stops abruptly at the ocean. It is now home to many who have come literally to the end of the line. For the small and less visible population of Asian immigrants, this doesn’t deliver the brave new world they were promised. They struggle to go about their lives in a desolate landscape of abandoned buildings, shuttered storefronts and shabby rehab centres. To pass through this district on a daily basis, as Wall does, is to witness a wretched theatre of abject humanity, where each circle consumed by its particular affliction - the homeless, the junkies, the hookers and those who prey on them - enacts its ritualised and dismal transactions to a certain finale, enlivened occasionally by a spectral young girl gripped by the wild contorted spasms of a crack dance.