For the Jeff Wall exhibit, I will be comparing The Flooded Grave and Coastal Motifs. I chose Coastal Motifs to compare to The Flooded Grave because this picture shows a balance between land, sky, and water in a way. It gives visual weight to its conventionally beautiful mountains and to its eerily depopulated industrial bay.
As you can see in The Flooded Grave, it is taken at a cemetary. The trees and graves are spaced apart from each other in a wide open space. It gives the feeling of emptiness to me. You can say that when a person dies, they will be buried in the gorund and covered up. The crows in the picutre give it a weird feeling of death and making it spooky. Then in the foreground, where a whole is dug in the ground. Discovering there is life waiting to be found. I guess it’s comparing life and death. This picture comprises images taken in two Vancouver cemeteries that are seamlessly merged with photographs of a living aquatic system the artist created in his studio. If I didn’t read his article, I wouldn’t know how Wall had taken this picture.
In Coastal Motifs, there are trees in the foreground and more trees in the further midground. Then there are the huge mountains showing how big and open the space is whereas the people living in that certain spot seem so small. Compared to nature, it’s so huge and vast. Then there are the clouds in the sky, it’s captured so well. The clouds fall right over the mountains. It gives me the feeling of something mystical, magical is coming from the sky. I guess it can be a comparison between heaven and earth.
