Jeff Wall--- the Dressing Poultry

        Over the last three decades Jeff Wall has redefined the photographic image in art. His stunning large-scale photographs exude the dramatic power of history painting with utterly contemporary subject matter (everyday scenes from modern life) and materials (colour transparencies in light boxes). Each of his photographic tableaux is meticulously constructed — in a process that the artist often compares to cinematography. The show at White Cube Mason's Yard consists of three large-scale colour transparencies mounted on aluminium light-boxes, and six black-and-white photographs. The most arresting light-box work is Dressing Poultry, in which three women process chicken carcasses in a cluttered barn on a small farm not far from Vancouver. It just looks like a snap from daily life of workers. The women laugh as they go about their gory business, loading headless chickens into a rickety plucking machine, before transferring their denuded corpses to a table. To the left, six hunks of pink and pimply flesh hang from a rope. This Brueghelesque scene with the caricatured ‘happily working class’ is about their everyday business.

       Wall is famous for grand tableaux— carefully staged, precisely lit and, since the late 1980s, digitally adjusted. He has been known to spend almost two years on a single picture. But in this case, he paid the farm-hands to let him document their work and refrained from digitally manipulating the image.