West Coast Succes Story

Catriona Jeffries will be in conversation with Witte de With’s director, Nicolaus Schafhausen, looking at how a city’s cultural reputation can rest on the shoulders of a small group of artists and examining the truth behind the myth of the current Vancouver art buzz.

Since the mid 1960s, a multitude of artists have chosen Vancouver as their home, including Ingrid Baxter, Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall. Catriona Jeffries is one of the city’s best-known gallerists, who has witnessed the influence that the conceptual strategies of these pioneering Vancouver artists have had on subsequent generations.

In 1994, Catriona Jeffries initiated an ambitious exhibition program in a gallery located in the Granville Street area of Vancouver. In 2006, the gallery moved to a 6500 square foot exhibition space at 274 East 1st Avenue, where the gallery’s expanded project continues. Catriona Jeffries has played an important historical role in establishing the lineages of younger artistic practices emerging from Vancouver and in securing the vital dialogue among the gallery’s artists with international museums and private collections. Through its recognized exhibition program, curatorial collaborations, off-site projects and writing projects published under CJ Press, the gallery contributes to an international discussion and currency of contemporary art. In addition to representing Brian Jungen, Jeffries works with Damien Moppett (recently presented at Witte de With in Don Quijote) and Alex Morrison (presented in Witte de With’s recent show Street: behind the cliché). She seeks to explore the critical relationship that exists between her Canadian artists and selected international artists whose practices engage in a reciprocating dialogue.