Rodney Graham
Canadian, 1949 - 2022
Active LocationVancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Biography1968 - 1971 Studied at UBC with Ian Wallace; part of the photoconceptual school. Graham's work includes conceptually driven text-works, music and sculpture; he is associated with a group of Vancouver artists that includes Jeff Wall, Ken Lum and others.
Biography
Rodney Graham's work has been exhibited internationally for over twenty years but his work became more widely recognized after he represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1997 with his film project, Vexation Island. In 2004, Rodney Graham: A Little Thought, was a mid career retrospective of his work traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Graham's work can be seen in the collections of major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Graham's art uses a strategy he calls "annexation," an ironic posture that differs from "appropriation" in the sense that his artwork will annex itself to existing works. For example, he has added a lengthy passage to Poe's text Landor's Cottage, produced a series of sculpture based on the works of Donald Judd and composed a work of music using some bars of Wagner's Parsifal that will take some years to play.
He says, "It may be a burden to re-invent oneself every time, but it makes things more interesting. My method of working comes out of a lack of technique because I did not come out of painting, sculpture or photography. I even dropped out of studying art history. Conceptual art and the tradition, established by artists like Judd, of having your work fabricated by someone else, made what I am doing possible. All art is about interpolating yourself into a tradition in one way or another."
His work centres around entropy, the conflict between nature and culture, and using a study of Freud as his entry point, the modern psyche. His work has been well received overseas, where it has been compared to that of Marcel Broodhaers. He is represented by galleries in Cologne, London, New York, Brussels and Antwerp.
"You don't have to delve very deeply into modern physics to realise that the scientific view holds that the world is really not as it appears. Before the brain rights it, the eye sees a tree upside down in the same way it appears on the glass back of the large format field camera I use. I chose the tree as an emblematic image because it is often used in diagrams in popular scientific books and because it was used in Saussure's book on linguistics to show the arbitrary relation between the so-called signifier and the signified. I was also using a kind of readymade strategy based on the disputable assumption that a photograph is not art but an upside down photo is."
Person TypeIndividual
