She's the One
Catriona Jeffries is advancing onto the international scene from her gallery base in Vancouver, where she is the dealer of choice for a generation of artists
When art people speak of dealer Catriona Jeffries, they invariably say one of two things. One is along the lines of, "She's doing for her artists what other dealers in Canada can't." The other, usually heard from international types eager to show off their cultist, intimate knowledge of the Vancouver scene, is, "It's the only commercial gallery that matters in Canada."
To the international collector or institution, artists working in Canada need context. Catriona Jeffries' entire brand works precisely because she's packaging and selling that context. When you collect one of her artists—say, a Ron Terada or a Damian Moppett—you are ostensibly "collecting Vancouver." If you pick up a Nestor Kruger or James Carl—first, where and to whom would you go, and second, you certainly aren't "collecting Toronto." As a writer and artist living in Toronto, I savour following the careers of the Vancouver set, as if they were part of a West Coast novel that was unfolding to an impressive climax. To get the big picture, I set out to meet the "publisher" of the novel—the woman behind the fanfare.
"Who's going to call Ralph Rugoff?" Catriona Jeffries and her assistant, Kyla Mallett, are having a divide-and-conquer power session. In the space of ten minutes, they've established the division of labour. They're making calls to the well-known California-based Artforum contributor and curator after they call LA MOCA, then Jeffries will write the upcoming press release while Mallett prepares slide material for Art Forum Berlin. And this is just a lazy late summer afternoon.
I sit across the table in her Granville Street gallery. Within moments, it becomes clear that Jeffries is first and foremost a woman who has a thinking fetish. She talks of Vancouver as if it were a state of mind, a diagnosable condition of being.
It's the projection of a mind both capricious and precise. With the rigour of a hardcore intellectual, Jeffries sustains a voracious appetite for ideas. She insists on the best conversation, the most engaging books, beautiful things and select people circling her constantly. It makes her a great dinner date, not to mention one of the most effective professionals in the business.
Jeffries has certainly owned the last five years of young contemporary art in Vancouver. Her stable includes Brian Jungen, Geoffrey Farmer, Damian Moppett, Myfanwy MacLeod, Ron Terada, Kelly Wood, Germaine Koh and, most recently, Alex Morrison—names that are otherwise a short list of the hot conceptual artists in Canada. With five of them emerging in 1998's "6: New Vancouver Modern" exhibition curated by Scott Watson at Vancouver's Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, four of them in 2002's "Bounce" and "IN THROUGH THE OUT DOOR" at the Power Plant in Toronto and three of them recently highlighted in TIME magazine, Jeffries' time has come.
To understand Jeffries and, to some degree, her success in arriving at national exclusivity with her artists, it's vital to realize she doesn't think of herself as a dealer only in the commercial sense, but also as a facilitator of conceptual practice. When asked about Brian Jungen's work, she thinks it through with you in earnest. As opposed to lazily bragging, dispatching the verbal curriculum vitae, she speaks of her artist's work with intimacy. One senses her turning the conceptual implications of Geoffrey Farmer's quixotic Hunchback Kit over and over again in her head, in bed, late at night. This woman obviously makes the effort to achieve great synchronicity with her artists. She reads the books and documents that Moppett is interested in. She examines the artists that Geoffrey Farmer is interested in. She asks herself, "How do I contextualize Geoffrey Farmer's practice in relation to Thomas Hirschhorn, Jason Rhoades, John Bock and Paul McCarthy?"
It seems the attention and affection go both ways. For Farmer's exhibition at the gallery last spring, he worked on a process piece based on a Robert Morris work. "I occupied the gallery for two months and altered the work on a daily basis," he explains. "It was photographed at the end of each day. There were ducts and tubes running through the office and the gallery and I often wore a black wig, acting as her doppelgänger. Actually, the piece was called Catriona Jeffries Catriona. I think she should win an award for enduring that."
Her specialty is bringing together collections of people, art and ideas. And she has certainly outgrown her Granville Street space, conceptually and administratively. A new space is definitely in the foreseeable future, just as soon as all the buzz she's been brokering simmers down to a dull roar. She'll eventually shift sites for the best possible reason, to give her artists the strategic exhibition opportunities so vital to their careers. Imagine: a Geoffrey Farmer/Thomas Hirschhorn exhibit...museum quality...in Vancouver, 2005...given by Farmer's dealer. Context is most certainly everything in the case of this gallery's success. Without a doubt, the next five years of the Catriona Jeffries Gallery are going to get really, really interesting.
From the start, she was always too smart. Born to a Scottish mother with roots in Glasgow and a Welsh father, Jeffries grew up in a patrician Vancouver household of privileged, liberal leanings. With frequent trips to the museum and theatre, her parents raised their children to actively engage with culture. She recalls the main household event as debating issues of the day around the dinner table. One of four daughters, Jeffries recollects her father looking at these four young women, imposing one firm value: You do what you want to do, and nothing stops you.
As the daughter of a physician she perfected winsome, then quickly mastered teenage wit and wisdom, evolving into an intellectually precocious bon vivant living in Paris.
"By the mid-'80s, I was in France," she recalls. "It was at that point that my affinity for the visual arts blossomed. Living in such a place, with such lofty ideas of art and culture, which made for more enlightened discussions on the street—well, it really made me think. But this is me as a naive twentysomething," she laughs. "At the time, I perceived that Canada had a certain absence of critical cultural life within the mainstream."
Ever clever, Jeffries' agenda involves working with dealers outside Canada. "None of my artists show through anyone else in this country, so I do a lot of work right across the country. My strategy is international. I know that I have great artists; my affinity is first and foremost with their artistic practices."
Is Jeffries Vancouver's answer to New York's Marian Goodman? I ask about role models. Surprise, surprise—as it turns out, there aren't any in Canada. After a pause, she cocks her head, then retraces her steps. "On second thought, Sandy Simpson was someone I watched with interest early on, as well as Ydessa Hendeles. And I speak regularly to Susan Hobbs in Toronto, as I consider her a colleague in this country. I suppose Marian Goodman is a model in that she's smart and remains at the forefront." Despite her admiration, she's quick to differentiate her venture from Goodman's.
"I see myself as distinct in that I resist a categorically corporate practice. My gallery must be able to operate with a playful sensibility in that I can do critically confrontational or difficult exhibitions. I must always be able to do that, and there are a group of galleries internationally that share that sensibility."
The Catriona Jeffries enterprise has been a learned one, a lesson hard won. The gallery wasn't always cutting-edge chic and Jeffries didn't always know what she was doing. On December 1, 1988, at the age of 26, Jeffries opened a small space that was on the third floor of an old forestry building in downtown Vancouver overlooking Burrard Street. This was her gawky toddler stage, and it was the '80s; no one emerged aesthetically unscathed.
"I make no bones or excuses," she says, recalling her beginnings. "I was young and mucking around. I was just starting to study art history. I represented artists that I don't represent now. Remember the sensibility at the time; there were Kiefers flying around all the auction houses!" She rolls her eyes, sits back in her chair and murmurs, "It was a peculiar moment of high, high consumerism, perhaps even a horrendous decade. Toward the end of it was when I opened the gallery."
After two years on Burrard, she relocated to Cambie Street in Yaletown and stayed for three years before setting up shop on Granville Street, where she's now been for nine years.
Around 1991, Jeffries met expatriate Brit Nigel Harrison in Vancouver; he became her partner in life and business. Prior to their meeting, Harrison had been living in London, working at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery with artists like Gilbert & George and Richard Long. Together they have two sons, aged eight and two. "I was reading Jerzy Kosinski at the time I met Nigel. He was heavily pursuing me; I wasn't interested at all," she remembers with a sheepish grin. "We went out one night and I said, 'So, what are you reading right now? I'm reading Kosinski.' He had read every novel Kosinski had written. That made an impression. We had a whirlwind romance and married very quickly."
"When we left Cambie Street, Nigel and I decided to really think things through. We had just taken on Christos Dikeakos and Ian Wallace." It was at this point that Jeffries began contact with Marian Goodman, Jeff Wall's dealer in New York. "I loved following the paths that were forged in Vancouver, and the tradition that emerged through the rise of N.E. Thing Company and Iain Baxter. The conceptual strategies developing here became deeply interesting to me."
She continues, "We see the conceptual moment in '68, '69, when it peaked and there is tremendous work being made. From that moment, how do we look at the conceptual strategies of Ron Terada, Kelly Wood, Damian Moppett?" Jeffries defies any neat second-generation or post-conceptualist categorizing of the younger artists in her stable. "There is no convenient little term for them."
Christos Dikeakos, one of Jeffries' more senior artists, has been with the gallery since 1989. "She's not sales-oriented for the sake of sales," he states emphatically. "With Catriona, it's always been that she promotes her artists with curators and museums, and collectors just naturally follow as a matter of course. She has a bigger range of artists, that range makes for very dynamic group exhibitions, this seems to give her latitude in the market."
Dikeakos reveals a deep respect for his dealer's genuine critical interest in making connections between generations, wanting to establish a lineage to certain young Vancouver artists. "At some point she had a good sense of knowing how to choose and deal with that history. She's very informed on the history of this place, critically and socially. It gives her depth and continuity." Dikeakos cites her intellectual integrity and honesty as one of the first things that impressed him about Jeffries. "When she started out in this business, she honed up on what she didn't know about contemporary art. She actively pursued this aesthetic education, took classes, talked to art historians. She specifically wanted to know about this place."
"So Catriona's got a really trendy gallery, creating buzz, notoriety...but that's no accident," he continues. "She's done this from a very learned position. She wouldn't be able to sustain it otherwise. Public galleries know that. Through her international connections, she continues to keep her established artists and still sell to the museum circuit, thus helping everyone in her gallery."
Toronto has never been a rite of passage for Vancouver. The trajectory of Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas and Rodney Graham was about going straight to New York and Europe direct. Vancouver is a city-state in many ways, complete unto itself. To that end, Jeffries considers herself a Vancouver dealer with an international agenda. "Part of the phenomenon of this place is that most everyone has stayed," she observes. "There's this great anxiety about what's not here, that we live on the edge. But the intellectual discussion lives here. It feeds into the art community; it means we're all very ambitious."
The Toronto-based conceptual artist Germaine Koh, whose cryptic, innovative practice might overwhelm a more traditional dealer, was initially attracted by the critical rigour and cohesiveness of the gallery, which she feels is unique in Canada. "She has positioned the gallery well, both conceptually and in terms of the market," she remarks. "At the same time, although their focus is international, Catriona and Nigel have shown their commitment and contributed a lot to the Vancouver community. Personally, I also appreciate that they support the entirety of my practice, including those ephemeral, site-specific and anti-commodity elements that are central to it but which don't translate to the commercial realm."
Jeffries strategically cultivates conversations about Vancouver on the international scene. She's out there making it relevant, talking both about specific practices and the practice of Vancouver. She outlines the lineages and the shifts. "I continue to bring international curators to Vancouver, which I do very actively and significantly. And conversely, if I go to New York, I meet with the curators at the MOMA or the DIA. Discussions within curatorial practice is what I do best."
Part of what distinguishes Jeffries from other Canadian dealers is the coherence of her project and operations. She's created conditions wherein both private collectors and public collections have to come to her. Her lists of private clients are increasingly in Los Angeles, New York, Washington, across Europe but mostly in England and Germany. Museum clients include the National Gallery of Canada, the AGO and the VAG, LA MOCA and FRAC Bretagne in France.
They have to come to her dialogue if they want to enter into a discussion about young conceptual Vancouver, a rather luxurious position that she has worked exceptionally hard for. "I'm not representing work that facilitates a decorative collection," she says. "A private collector comes to this work and I help them get there. It's important they see the critical parameters under which these artists work, within this particular moment of contemporary culture. As a result, I don't work with an awful lot of art consultants to fill corporate towers."
The most recent Art Forum Berlin only served to further confirm Jeffries' growing list of new international clients and curatorial attention. As a result, Brian Jungen will be included in a show at Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Castello di Rivoli, in Torino, Italy, entitled "The Moderns." It is a serious look at modernism curated by former P.S.1 Senior Curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. In addition, Alex Morrison is slated for a solo show at Frankfurter Kunstverein.
"I am interested in the system," she states with precision. "I don't separate the importance of critical ideas and the commercial undertaking. There's the artist, the curator, the critic, the dealer, the collector. Within an ideal art system, the dealer shouldn't be so separated and crass. These artists are important; they're intelligent. The person who represents them has to be involved and able to keep up with the conversation."
Spring 2003
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