In the late 1960s I began to make works using photographs of urban architecture, reflections of the city in windows and of pedestrians at intersections. In these images of the everyday the street was like an abstract line cut through the space of the city. The crosswalk was analogous to the rectangular frame of monochrome painting intersected by pedestrians and traffic. By the mid-1980s I expanded the idea into a series entitled My Heroes in the Street in which photographs of my friends crossing the street were enlarged, mounted on canvas and combined with monochrome painting. This allowed me to mix the discourse of modernism and post-modernism with references to the city and its architecture, ironic comments on existential subjectivity, the empty significance of monochrome painting and the ability of photographic imagery to appropriate reality as a ready-made . . . - Ian Wallace.