RODNEY GRAHAM: "Artist in Artist’s Bar (Prop Paintings and Other Paintings)", Sept. 17 to Nov. 16, 2014 Charles H. Scott Gallery; and "Collected Works", to Oct. 4, 2014, Rennie Collection, Vancouver

×

1 of 3

Expand

Courtesy: Rennie Collection, Vancouver. Photo: Blaine Campbell.

"The Gifted Amateur, Nov. 10th, 1962"

Rodney Graham, "The Gifted Amateur, Nov. 10th, 1962," 2007, three transmounted chromogenic transparencies in painted aluminum light boxes, overall: 112.5" x 220" x 7".

×

2 of 3

Expand

Courtesy: Rennie Collection, Vancouver. Photo: Blaine Campbell.

"Oak Tree Red Bluff (1-8)"

Rodney Graham, "Oak Tree Red Bluff (1-8)", 1993/2000, eight black-and-white photographs each, framed: 32.4" x 41.4" in.

×

3 of 3

Expand

Rodney Graham, "Two Movements for Prepared Cello," 2010

cello, chair, carpet, vitrine, two cufflinks, pair of shoes, shirt, black suit, bow tie, film, score and sound, dimensions variable (courtesy Rennie Collection, Vancouver, photo by Blaine Campbell)

Prev

Next

RODNEY GRAHAM

Artist in Artist’s Bar (Prop Paintings and Other Paintings)

Sept. 17 to Nov. 16, 2014

Charles H. Scott Gallery;

and Collected Works, to Oct. 4,

Rennie Collection, Vancouver

By Michael Harris

Gallery insiders were calling it The Season of Rodney even a year ago, when plans for a trio of solo Rodney Graham exhibitions were just shaping up. Now, with the last two of those exhibitions, the effect is a gift of perspective – we see the true breadth of Graham’s work and the constancy of his wandering.

Graham is best known for upside-down photographs of trees (they recall the history of the camera obscura and also the mechanics of the human eye, which delivers upside-down images to the brain). Those images are so iconic, in fact, that they’ve been reproduced on Canadian stamps. But these shows invite us to move beyond that icon. The grandiosity of the endeavour became possible thanks to the Rennie Collection, which has amassed more than 40 Graham works over the last 14 years (some of those works contain dozens of individual pieces). “I originally just thought we’d buy eight upside-down oak trees,” Rennie says. “We said that was it, but here we are.”

The Rennie Collection’s own exhibition at the Wing Sang building delivers a motley crew: light boxes, video work, paintings and installations are on display, including a stunning, 39-foot-high wall of modernist paintings, complete with ladder. The Belkin Gallery at UBC, meanwhile, presented (along with other works) their coveted Vexation Island film, in which Graham plays a castaway on a desert island, forever thwarted in his existentialist (and comical) desire to pluck a coconut. This was Graham’s submission for the 1997 Venice Biennale and, in the opinion of many, it made his career.

The final piece of the exhibition puzzle, in the Charles H. Scott Gallery at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, creates a meta-experience: new paintings by Graham hang alongside paintings that were used as props in earlier photo works. (For example: in the photo triptych The Gifted Amateur (on exhibit at the Rennie Collection show) an artist (played by Graham) is making an abstract painting in the den of a modernist home – that “prop” gets upgraded to gallery status at the Scott show.

Gallery-goers have an opportunity, then, to travel the expanse (and twisting tracks) of an extraordinary career. By hopping through three galleries, visitors can see how Graham constantly leaves his comfort zone and interrogates the role of “artist” itself. After the tree photographs, for example, he became known for elaborately choreographed scenes in which he depicted himself as “somewhat losers” (the words of American conceptual artist Dan Graham, no relation). And then there was the time he lobbed potatoes at a gong for a live audience …

Anyone who knows Graham shouldn’t be surprised by the scope of all this, of course. He’s a consummate researcher, voraciously hunting down new ideas and new references. The last time I saw him at his studio he had just completed a masterful quartet of light boxes called Four Seasons, wherein he plays four men taking smoke breaks: “No more light boxes,” he said. “I need to move on. I just don’t know where.”