Jeff Wall’s large-scale images are windows into the theatre of the everyday. In one, a man casually backflips in the middle of a legion hall. Another shows a crowd of partygoers smoking outside a moonlit nightclub. Yet another features a horseback rider hauling herself up from the ground while the horse who tossed her looks on indifferently. Wall’s images seem natural and organic, as if plucked from daily life. But the reality is that most of them were often meticulously staged. He often spent months gathering props, casting performers and producing sets on location or in studio before taking a photo.

Wall was raised around art, painting in his parents’ toolshed-turned-studio as a kid, then studying art history at the University of British Columbia. By the end of the 1970s, he started staging and photographing the intricate scenes that would define his career. One of his first major works, The Destroyed Room, shows the aftermath of unseen violence: Wall created a red bedroom strewn with ripped fabrics, open dresser drawers, stray shoes, loose jewellery and a slashed, upturned mattress. He wanted viewers to see every detail, so when it debuted in Vancouver’s Nova Gallery in 1978, he printed it at 160 by 230 centimetres on transparent slide film, backlit and displayed in the gallery’s storefront window.

Over the next few years, Wall shifted his lens toward scenes about social tension and microaggressions; his best-known work in this mode, Mimic, depicts a white man making a slant-eyed gesture at an Asian passerby. He also evolved with technology: in the ’90s, Wall embraced Photoshop to create composites. Dead Troops Talk, stitched from around 50 photographs made in Wall’s studio, shows a group of dead........

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