Jeff Wall Canadian, 1946- Jeff Wall (born in Vancouver, British Columbia) received critical acclaim in the late 1970s for his signature light-box vignettes, colorful staged scenes that comment on the negative effects of capitalism in late 20th-century society. Trained as an art historian at the University of British Columbia and the Courtauld Institute in London, Wall relies on his academic background, especially its emphasis on Marxist theory, to inform the work he creates. For his earliest images, Wall produced ironic horror stills. Fabricating large stage sets controlled by studio lighting, he introduced benumbed, lifeless models engaged in, or watching, violent and disturbing scenarios. The traditional stage settings combined with the glossy displays of advertising offer pessimistic visions of a culture made insensitive to aggression, destruction, and death. This theme of death-in-life has become a stylistic trademark in Wall's work, along with his interest in the violent passion that is common to our age of what he terms "modern, bourgeois, neurotic private life." Wall has continued to explore these ideas with the additional aid of computer manipulation. Widely shown, his work has been included in Directions 1981, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1981), documenta 7, the Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (1982), and Passage de l'image, the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1991). Wall lives in Vancouver. A.W.