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Behind the lens: The Vancouver School debate

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Behind the lens: The Vancouver School debate

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Behind the lens: The Vancouver School debate 

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The group exhibition “Pictures From Here” at the Vancouver Art Gallery presents photographs and video works by Vancouver-based artists that date from the late ‘50s to the present

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The group exhibition “Pictures From Here” at the Vancouver Art Gallery presents photographs and video works by Vancouver-based artists that date from the late ‘50s to the present

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The term "Vancouver School of photography" has been used to describe a group of artists from Vancouver whose work is based in photo-conceptual practices (and who often photograph the city itself). Starting in the '80s, art critics and curators began to notice a number of Vancouver artists reacting to conceptual art's downgrading of visual values with photographs of high intensity and complex content that probed, obliquely or directly, the social force of imagery.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Vancouver Art Gallery Archive

The group exhibition "Pictures From Here" at the Vancouver Art Gallery presents photographs and video works by Vancouver-based artists that date from the late '50s to the present. The photos are from the Vancouver Art Gallery's Collection and from private collections. The exhibition reflects the development of the innovative lens- based practices that emerged as a counter- point to the lyrical landscape tradition that dominated art making in this city well into the '70s. At that time, Vancouver-based artists such as Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall and Christos Dikeakos adopted intellectually rigorous approaches to photography that both articulated an affinity with the challenges to tradition put forward by the modernist avant-garde and acknowledged the place in which they were working. Focusing on representations of the city and its surrounds, the exhibition acknowledges the legacy of the innovative approaches to photography developed in Vancouver, while also emphasizing the diverse range of interests and socially engaged practices that have informed lens-based art in the city over the past four decades. The exhibition include Rodney Graham's monumental light-box "Paddler, Mouth of the Seymour" (2012-13). The large three panel light-box is based on a painting known as "Max Schmidt in A Single Scull" (1871) by the American Realist Thomas Eakins. Graham adapts the original painting to a contemporary setting, playing Schmidt as a contemporary kayaker on a break. The work forms part of a series of works depicting the classic theme of the Four Seasons and represents Autumn. Christos Dikeakos moved to Vancouver in 1956, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia in 1970. Working primarily in photography and text his photos like "Firewood, Alert Bay" (2010), speak to the transformation of land use and the spiritual dimensions of nature, both of which inform Indigenous cultural beliefs. In Jeff Wall's work "Monologue" (2013) three middle-aged men are in a back garden, two of them seated, one standing, it takes place under a large lamp, with a tree behind each of them. The scenery is controlled by him down to the last detail, it was shot in his studio, and with that information one perhaps better understands the definite feeling of something 'artificial' in the work: this is real, it actually exists in the world, but it is not what we understand by documentation. Penner Bancroft's "spiritland/Octopus Books Fourth Avenue" (1987) is a panorama, comprising five unframed silver-gelatin prints, re-interrogates the place of public civic memory. The work depicts the now-defunct business, Octopus Books, an alternative left bookstore on Fourth Avenue now relegated to an empty lot. One of Canada's most significant artists, Ian Wallace has played a fundamental role in the development of contemporary art since the late 1960s by bringing together two great image-making traditions, painting and photography, in works like "At the Crosswalk VII" (2011) that is on show in the exhibition On Presentation are works by: Roy Arden, Karin Bubaš, Christos Dikeakos, Stan Douglas, Greg Girard, Rodney Graham, Mike Grill, Arni Haraldsson, Fred Herzog, Barrie Jones, Evan Lee, N.E. Thing Co., Marian Penner Bancroft, Henri Robideau, Sandra Semchuk and James Nicholas, Althea Thauberger, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Paul Wong , Cornelia Wyngaarden and Andrea Fatona.
Info: Curator: Grant Arnold, Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, Duration: 19/5-4/9/17, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 10:00-17:00, Tue 10:00-21:00, http://vanartgallery.bc.ca

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The term "Vancouver School of photography" has been used to describe a group of artists from Vancouver whose work is based in photo-conceptual practices (and who often photograph the city itself).

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Engendering an avant-garde: The unsettled landscapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism

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Engendering an avant-garde: The unsettled landscapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism

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As I climb up the stairs, a grid of 35 black-and-white photographs appears on an ochre-coloured wall. The photographs, some more recognizable than others, show a First Nations man on the shore, who removes his business suit and walks into the water wearing a bear-claw necklace. He sheds tears throughout the ritual, the meaning of which becomes clearer through his poetic testimony as a residential-school survivor, which is written on a scroll accompanying the pictures. His name is James Nicholas, and he created this work, Taking Off Skins (1994), in collaboration with his wife and photographic artist Sandra Semchuk.

Overwhelmed by the visceral experience of suffering, grief and awakening, I turn around. There, on the far side of the gallery space, against a white wall, I see Rodney Graham's Paddler, Mouth of the Seymour (2012-13), a triptych of massive chromogenic prints in light boxes stretched from floor to ceiling.

The dramatic contrast of these two works has caught me off guard at the entrance of "Pictures From Here," which currently occupies the entire second floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery. I expected to be surrounded by lustrous, immersive pictures like Graham's, not stark and fragmented ones like Taking Off Skins, at this exhibition, which claims to show the "pictures" representative of Vancouver.

After all, Vancouver's reputation as an epicentre of contemporary art owes greatly to local artists like Jeff Wall, who rekindled the interest in representation by introducing "light-box photoconceptualism" and monumental "tableaux" photographs. One of the most broadly recognized aspects of Wall's artistic style is arguably the sheer sizes and sumptuous outlooks of his photographic prints, which are evocative of history painting or cinema.

The pivotal traits of photoconceptualism converge on the art-historically informed understanding of the photographic surface as a representational space on a par with the pictorial and the cinematic. Thus, the compound word "photoconceptualism" is misleading in its connotation of Conceptual art, which treated photographs as archivable data, rather than the subject of aesthetic experience. Wall himself has publicly expressed his preference for the more inclusive term "pictures" to the vague and outdated nomenclature of photoconceptualism.

Beginning in the late 1970s onwards, the trans-medium approach to photography was shared with other leading figures of the so-called Vancouver School, including Ian Wallace, Christos Dikeakos, Roy Arden, Stan Douglas and Rodney Graham. It is not an overstatement that their work substantially contributed to the international vogue for enlargement and beautification in contemporary art photography, which troubled many critics who saw in it the return of high art that photography had fought against so hard since the 1960s.

The exhibition's curator, Grant Arnold, butts against the naturalized connection between big, pretty pictures and Vancouver with a sophisticated selection of photographic and video work by 20 artists and artist duos strategically arranged throughout "Pictures From Here." The show widens the category "pictures" by stretching its chronological and technical boundaries beyond postmodernism and art photography.

This widening is most apparent with the vernacular colour snapshots of Vancouver's various neighbourhoods taken by Fred Herzog as early (in this show) as 1958. Adhering to the documentary tradition of photography, Herzog's pictures read in 2017 as the guileless records of a bygone era and its forgotten reality.

Cornelia Wyngaarden and Andrea Fatona's documentary film Hogan's Alley (1994) also testifies to a bygone era in a kindred manner. The lo-fi video consists of the interviews with three women who lived and worked in the eponymous community heavily populated by black families and businesses before it was demolished in 1970. With Herzog's photographs and Hogan's Alley, viewers engage in the act of witnessing and commemoration with a strong sense of nostalgia.

This remembrance is an experience completely dissimilar to viewing a ramshackle house in one of Arden's large-format chromogenic photographs or the reimagined interior of a 1950s dormitory in Douglas's two-channel projection Win, Place or Show (1998), shot in luscious, saturated colours. Arden and Douglas, although their works undeniably touch on the history and economy of Vancouver's Strathcona neighborhood, invite the viewers ultimately to contemplate the pictures themselves, their phenomenological functions and the intellectual rationales behind their scale and beauty.

"Pictures From Here" also attempts to dilute the ingrained preconception about the local artists homogeneously remembered by the mythic attribution to the Vancouver School. To this end, the exhibition pairs the established names with their fairly unknown works either recently acquired by the museum or borrowed from private collectors or the artists. For example, Dikeakos is showcased with 26 Street Scan Photographs (1969-96), his early sequence of 26 black-and-white photographs taken while driving along the south of False Creek, rather than his iconic colour panoramas. Wallace's large photo-paintings are balanced with a small, black-and-white photograph Disaster (June 17, 1958)(1985), which was originally shot when he was 14 and shows the collapsed spans of the original Second Narrows Bridge. In the same imagistic vein, two large yet rather somber photographs by Wall are on view: a silver gelatin print (2007) and a chromogenic print titled Monologue (2013), the latter of which has never put on display in Vancouver before.

Wall's larger works do not explicitly quote Vancouver-it was a risk to include them, especially given Wall's numerous famed light boxes featuring local surroundings. Although the show presents the light-box display as an important component of Vancouver's lens-based art, it does so by including less canonical examples: the modest-sized landscapes of industrial sites by N.E. Thing Co. and the humorous seasonal scenes, each interrupted by a flying frozen salmon, of Barrie Jones.

The light-box works by N.E. Thing Co. and Jones are notably different from the well-groomed, theatrical scenes orchestrated in the cinematic photographs by Wall or Graham. In the latter, the immense light boxes are often discussed in relation to Minimalist sculpture and narrative painting. By contrast, N.E. Thing Co. and Jones tend to reference the moments and places arrested in the photographs-the photograph of elevated business signs taken by N.E. Thing Co. at Boundary Road and Grandview Highway, in particular, is a reminder of the commercial provenance of the light-box apparatus, creating an ironic tension in the rarefied gallery setting.

Throughout, the exhibition portrays Vancouver's artistic community as an archipelago that harbours many different views. "Pictures From Here" pays attention to the spirit of experimentalism that has existed in the region since the 1970s among artists outside the herd of photoconceptualists. Marian Penner Bancroft 's gritty black-and-white pictures exemplify her enduring interests in the emotional labour and tactility involved in the production and experience of photography. Her pictures, always fragmented, juxtaposed and overlapped, offer an effective counterargument against the seamlessly glistening surface of the tableau photographs included in the show.

Patchworks and fractures are also crucial to Henri Robideau, who stitches discrete photographs together manually or digitally and scribbles his comments around them. Arni Haraldsson uses affiliated tactics in Nothing Will Have Taken Place But the Place (1986), which surveys two different buildings-the artist's dwelling and the museum-through paired photographs.

Significantly, the exhibition makes sure that these variegated perspectives address Vancouver's multifarious and contested identity, be it political, economic, cultural or historical. Bancroft's spiritland/Octopus Books, Fourth Avenue (1987) and Robideau's Oppenheimer Park Homeless Summer 2014 (2015) or Giant Sparrows & Olympic Village (2015) offer cautionary tales about the gentrification of the city and its unaffordable housing market. Bancroft and Robideau also address the threatened knowledge about the Indigenous presence in the province in Xa:ytem, formerly HOLDING (property) (1991) and the Four Directions of the Okanagan series (2000), respectively.

These issues around gentrification, Indigeneity and contested civic identity resonate more loudly than ever before in Vancouver. One work that drives this home is Paul Wong's single-channel video Vigil 5.4 (2010), a non-linear documentation of Rebecca Belmore's work Vigil, which was performed in a back alley in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver in 2002. The powerful performance commemorates the murdered and missing Indigenous women from the city's streets, particularly those killed by Robert Pickton. Their names are written on Belmore's arms and cried out loud one by one as she destroys long-stemmed roses with her teeth. Belmore hammers nails, each one representing a victim, into her red dress, leaving it hanging on a telephone pole like blood-soaked skin.

On my way out of "Pictures From Here," I return to the spot where Nicholas and Semchuk's Taking Off Skins confronts Graham's Paddler, Mouth of the Seymour, and I notice another discrepancy. Whereas Nicholas tries to remove the mask of a false identity forced upon him by colonialism, Graham wears the fictional character of a resting paddler. The artists' divergent understandings of identity and masquerade undoubtedly resulted in the drastic formal contrast between their works: the fractured and muddy photographs taken by Semchuk without looking into the viewfinder and Graham's smoothly sutured tableau brimming with vibrant details.

The skin exposed by Nicholas, Semchuk and Belmore couldn't be further from the glossy pellicle of grand photographic prints in the works like Graham's. And yet all of the artworks in "Pictures From Here" respond, either consciously or unwittingly, to the premise that pictures function as the second skin through which a person encounters reality. Whether one aims to lacerate or embellish that membrane, pictures remain the primary visual interface of our image-saturated life. "Pictures From Here" highlights the wild variety of that interface, which moulds the beholder's experience into heterogeneous conceptions of Vancouver.
Anton Lee is a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia. "Pictures From Here" continues at the Vancouver Art Gallery until September 4, 2017.

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As I climb up the stairs, a grid of 35 black-and-white photographs appears on an ochre-coloured wall. The photographs, some more recognizable than others, show a First Nations man on the shore, who removes his business suit and walks into the water wearing a bear-claw necklace.

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UJ3RK5 - Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham... etc

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UJ3RK5 - Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham... etc

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Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Ian Wallace,
Kitty Byrne, Colin Griffiths, Danice McLeod
Frank Ramirez, David Wisdom.
U-J3RK5 (pronounced "you jerk"—the five is silent) was a Vancouver based band from the late 1970s. Their style was post-punk/new wave, but was more art rock than synth pop.  Their self-titled debut album portrayed these members of Vancouver's school of so-called 'photoconceptualism' or 'post-conceptual photography'. It included a hit single titled "Eisenhower and the Hippies" , a song inspired by a work of American conceptual art proponent Dan Graham.  U-J3rk5 was featured in the 2010 documentary film Bloodied but Unbowed, directed by Susanne Tabata.

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CIBACHROME: THE RAREST COLOR PHOTOGRAPHIC PROCESS IN THE WORLD TODAY

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CIBACHROME: THE RAREST COLOR PHOTOGRAPHIC PROCESS IN THE WORLD TODAY

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Cibachrome: The Rarest Color Photographic Process in the World Today

A JOBO CPP-2 processor does the heavy lifting.

About Cibachrome

Cibachrome belongs to the tradition of analog photography including the wet darkroom, chemistry, and film. In its commercial prime, Cibachrome occupied a unique place in analog photography as the only process for producing photographic prints directly from color transparency film. The paper was discontinued in late 2011 and presently, in North America, there are only about five full-time practitioners of the Ilfochrome process.

The Uniqueness of Cibachrome

To understand what makes Cibachrome unique, it's helpful to compare it to the process that basically makes up the rest of chemistry-based analog photography. Almost all commercial color film and papers are created using the chromogenic process. In the chromogenic process, exposed silver halide material (film or paper) is processed with color developer that reacts with color-couplers in the material. Color image dyes are formed which, together, construct the color negative or photograph.

Ilfochrome, by comparison, is a direct-positive, chromolytic process. It's a silver dye bleach material that incorporates highly concentrated cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes into the paper's emulsion. The combination of these dyes forms black. Complete removal of the dyes would yield transparency but appear white due to a white base layer. Depending on the degree of exposure in an image, the dyes are bleached away proportionately, revealing color and forming a positive photograph.

Ilfochrome's Characterisitcs

A number of characteristics, when combined, distinguish Cibachrome from all other photographic printing papers, both analog and digital. The paper's base is polyester (Melinex by DuPont) and has exceptional dimensional stability - it's very flat and sturdy. The paper is chemically inert enabling a bright neutral white critical to good color reproduction. The surface layer of Cibachrome is exceptionally smooth giving prints a high gloss finish. And because light reflectance in the material is more directional, prints, viewed at an angle, can exhibit an almost metallic appearance.

There's a moment of magic when a wet print is pulled from the processor, a glowing affirmation of creative intent.

Cibachrome's greatest characteristic is its color Azo dyes. Embedded in the paper, these cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes are both exceedingly pure and stable. The dyes render images with excellent saturation and hue. Prints are very sharp, the high image resolution, a result of the anti-light scattering characteristics of the dyes themselves. And, under appropriate lighting, prints feel like they are lit from within, invoking a strong sense of dimensionality unique to all photographic printmaking.

In other words, these prints are absolutely beautiful.

The magic moment; a print just pulled from the JOBO processor.

Why Cibachrome?

I've been asked this question many times over the years and I find my answer hasn't wavered. My love and commitment to Cibachrome, despite its anxiety-inducing commercial history, is rooted in deeply held values of hand craftsmanship, excellence, and creative expression. To create with one's hands, physically, where the object's formation hinges on your every decision and movement, is incredibly fulfilling to me. There's a moment of magic when a wet print is pulled from the processor, a glowing affirmation of creative intent. And, despite many digital enthusiasts objections, a well printed Ilfochrome, properly displayed, is still unrivaled for its beauty in all color photographic printmaking.

Creative Veracity

I am a firm believer in the marriage of process to artistic intent. It is fundamental to realizing the highest achievements in creative expression. I refer to this as creative veracity. An artist, to realize his or her vision, must choose tools aligned to that vision, even if they fly in the face of cultural trends and conformities. Cibachrome, as a tool of creative expression, is ideally suited to my film-based large format photography, the crux of my photographic existence. It eloquently expresses the truth I strive to convey of my inspiration, its experience, and resulting insights.

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Cibachrome - Douglas Vincent Photographic Arts

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Cibachrome belongs to the tradition of analog photography including the wet darkroom, chemistry, and film. In its commercial prime, Cibachrome occupied a unique place in analog photography as the only process for producing photographic prints directly from color transparency film.

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“I admire people who make it sound easy. Stephen Malkmus makes it sound pretty easy.”

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Vancouver artist Rodney Graham’s ‘infuriatingly hilarious’ work was a Venice Biennale highlight  OBITUARY

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Vancouver artist Rodney Graham’s ‘infuriatingly hilarious’ work was a Venice Biennale highlight  OBITUARY

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Vancouver artist Rodney Graham’s ‘infuriatingly hilarious’ work was a Venice Biennale highlight

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Graham earned particular acclaim for his video and film installations and elaborately staged still photographs in which he would appear, usually as a bumbling anti-hero. He is dead at age 73

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Rodney Graham introduces ‘Media Studies’ at Hauser & Wirth Zurich

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Rodney Graham introduces ‘Media Studies’ at Hauser & Wirth Zurich

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Rodney Graham introduces ‘Media Studies’ at Hauser & Wirth Zurich

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The Painstaking Detail Rodney Graham Puts into Each of His Self-Portraits - 2019

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The Painstaking Detail Rodney Graham Puts into Each of His Self-Portraits - 2019

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I don't know Rodney Graham, but you could say I've met him plenty of times before. Sometimes he's been a lighthouse keeper; other times a jazz drummer, a hipster media studies professor, a professional poker player, and a smoking waiter. The conceptual photographer (part of the so-called Vancouver School, alongside the likes of Jeff Wall and Stan Douglas) has made a career assuming offbeat personalities that star in intricately assembled tableaux. For inspiration, he pilfers art history, film, pop culture, and scenes from everyday life. In every case, he's recognizably himself-there are no masks or prosthetic noses involved-and yet perversely othered. The title of a 2017 survey show at the BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art sums up these transformations nicely: "That's not me."

The real Rodney Graham, who I met in person at 303 Gallery in New York, is casual and cool. Despite a shock of stylish grey hair, he looks enviably youthful for someone who, next week, will celebrate his 70th birthday. He's in town for the opening of his latest show, a series of large-scale lightbox photographs alongside colorful, kinetic abstract paintings. In the photographs, we see Graham in various guises: gallerist, hunter, philosopher, tattooed tough. Each photograph is the result of countless hours spent sourcing props, building sets, and snapping hundreds-if not thousands-of digital images, which are then seamlessly assembled in post-production.

Vacuuming the Gallery, 1949 (2018) is, with its four panels, the biggest lightbox piece Graham has yet to make. It's also a good entrypoint to examine how the artist operates, from conception through execution. He found inspiration in an archival photograph of Samuel Kootz, who, along with his wife, Jane, ran an influential midcentury gallery out of an apartment in Midtown. In that image, Kootz is pictured sitting in a chair. That wasn't interesting enough for Graham, who decided to embody the gallerist tidying up the place before an opening. "He's maybe slumming," Graham mused. "He's ironically vacuuming. 'I'm the gallery owner-but I'm vacuuming!'" A pipe was added, for the sake of whimsy ("There's something about having a pipe in your mouth; it looks like you're smirking"), and the walls of the faux-gallery were hung with the sort of abstract paintings that would have looked envelope-pushing a few years after World War II.

This is only a single image, but even hearing about how it came to be can prove exhausting. Rather than renting generic midcentury-style canvases from a prop shop, Graham used the opportunity as an excuse to make the paintings himself, later commissioning individual frames suitable to the era. "They're all generated from a single Rodchenko drawing from 1940 that's cut up and put through the computer," he explained, which evolved "the formal vocabulary out of this smaller original." (The physical paintings exhibited at 303 came out of a further evolution of this same concept.)

The set for the photograph-a two-room, carpeted gallery space, with classy furniture and a boarded-up fireplace-was constructed from scratch in Graham's roughly 3,000-square-foot Vancouver studio. Graham-as-Kootz is seen pushing around a Eureka model vacuum cleaner, which the artist chose for its wordplay-"it riffs on a 'eureka moment' when you're looking at art." It all adds up to an incredibly labor-intensive visual joke that is both elegant and silly.

Around the corner, we find some very different Rodney Grahams. In Remorseful Hunter (2019), closely based on an old painting that the artist bought from a thrift store, he's perched on a rock in the middle of the forest, holding a rifle. A nearby squirrel gazes at him inquisitively. Graham-who often spins elaborate biographies for his characters-simply thinks of the hunter as "somebody who did not want to kill anymore." The swirl of aesthetic inspirations here range from Norman Rockwell to Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest and the films of Douglas Sirk. For the set, Graham turned to a professional he refers to as "Rock Bob," a "film guy who knows how to make these perfect foam rocks." Vancouver, the artist explained, has increasingly become a hotbed of film production, a development that allows him to tap into industry networks for his elaborate shoots.

Tattooed Man on Balcony (2018) is a fairly self-explanatory picture: man, balcony, tattoos. The balcony belongs to a style of house called the Vancouver Special, omnipresent in the city; the tattoos are specially-produced temporary ones, all based on characters from Popeye. (Graham doesn't have any ink himself, but he told me that he once considered a permanent image of Popeye battling a squid.) The tattooed man is "a little bit of a fashion victim," the artist surmised. "He's into the rockabilly look-and he's got time on his hands." Post-production involved a bit of Photoshop magic. "I'm slimmed down on that one," he admitted. "I tried to work out a bit at the gym, but I didn't quite get there." At first, Graham's assistant went a little overboard with the slimming-"He made me really cut "-and they had to backtrack.

I asked how the artist gets himself into the mindset of each character-expecting, perhaps, a tale of mindful meditation or full-blown Daniel Day-Lewis theatrics. The real answer is more pedestrian. Each image involves less acting, he said, than simple posing. "It's all just about micromovements," he explained. "It's very uncomfortable, actually. Trying to look relaxed, but: 'Could you tilt your head a little that way, [make] your knuckle go like that?'" The potentials of digital photography, Graham added, mean that these minute adjustments-a glance, a look, the angle of a wrist-can all be retooled in the studio in real-time.

As he's gotten older, Graham has had to constrain himself to age-appropriate characters. "There's a certain degree of accepting what I look like, and the roles defined by that," he said. "They're more limited now. Eventually, I'm going to have to retire as an actor." Until that point, though, we can look forward to at least a few more iterations of Rodney Graham-an artist who knows that sometimes, being yourself is highly overrated.

Correction: A previous version of this article suggested that Rodney Graham's show at 303 Gallery opened on January 12th; it opened on January 11th and will close February 23rd. The text has been updated to reflect this change.

Jenna Gribbon, Luncheon on the grass, a recurring dream, 2020. Jenna Gribbon, April studio, parting glance, 2021. Jenna Gribbon, Silver Tongue, 2019

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In Rodney Graham's Self Portraits, Every Painstaking Detail Matters | Artsy

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I don't know Rodney Graham, but you could say I've met him plenty of times before. Sometimes he's been a lighthouse keeper; other times a jazz drummer, a hipster media studies professor, a professional poker player, and a smoking waiter.

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Confessions Of A Window Cleaner: Rodney Graham Interviewed - 2018

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Confessions Of A Window Cleaner: Rodney Graham Interviewed - 2018

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Installation view of Rodney Graham: Central Questions of Philosophy, Lisson Gallery, London (3 October - 3 November 2018) Photographer George Darrell. © Rodney Graham; Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Rodney Graham is definably an interdisciplinary artist, examining nuances in cultural and historical threads across a variety of media, including performance, music, sculpture, painting and video.

Living and working in Vancouver throughout his career, Graham studied under Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall during the beginning of the Vancouver School's conceptual photography movement. Initially influenced heavily by their work, he soon branched out into his own aesthetic territories.

Graham's work inhabits the space between artist, performer and observer. He provides insight into social and historical cultures through often humorous depictions of the tropes he witnesses. This interview takes place during a tour of his recent solo show Central Questions of Philosophy at Lisson Gallery in London.

The exhibition (open until November third) explores the nature of the artist as a creator, performer and as a sort of culture-sponge. An envoy for ephemeral ideas, artefacts or symbols that filter down through communication - eventually becoming ubiquitous in our language and collective imaginations.

Through a series of light box works, Graham is photographed playing characters. These range from an ageing rockabilly fan in Vancouver through to famed gallerist Samuel Kootz and philosopher AJ Ayres. The key tenet linking these figures together remains the decision of the artist to inhabit them in some way. The walls surrounding the brand new series of light boxes entitled Vacuuming The Gallery, 1949 are surrounded by paintings made by the artist as he performed the actions of an artist working in 1949.

Graham's works involve layers within layers, both figuratively and literally. The transparencies on the previously mentioned light boxes are made up of countless photographs of carefully staged sets. The conceptualism Graham learnt during his education in British Columbia carries throughout this new exhibition. The reasons for the work may not always be initially clear, but the conversations found in them are myriad.

Installation view of Rodney Graham: Central Questions of Philosophy, Lisson Gallery, London (3 October - 3 November 2018) Photographer George Darrell. © Rodney Graham; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
I was listening to U-J3RK5 [Graham's post-punk band from the late 1970s] earlier today
Rodney Graham: Oh yeah?
On a Vancouver punk compilation
the one with the blue stripe on it? Terrible cover.
It reminded me of Gang of Four, or Magazine or something in that wheelhouse. You guys toured together, right?
With Gang of Four? That was awesome. They were really good, really cool people as well.
I saw Dan Higgs recently in Leeds. Do you know his music? It seems like something that you'd be into.
Yeah, I actually have an indirect connection to him. I actually did a piece that relates to one of the works in this show [ Tattooed Man On Balcony, 2018]. I wrote an open letter to a tattooer describing a tattoo that I wanted on my back, the poem is written with the text cascading across the page. The tattoo was of Popeye in a deep-sea diving suit with a helmet on blowing bubbles through his pipe, fighting a giant squid. The squid is fighting back and spraying black ink everywhere and it's going up my back and over my shoulder. I gave the poem to a tattooer to get the flash drawn up with the intention of showing the flash alongside the light box work, but decided not to. The guy who drew the tattoo flash had actually studied under Dan Higgs, from Brooklyn or something. I knew Higgs' music a little bit, I have a record of him doing Banjo improv. I never really knew about Lungfish until I got this record, but it's funny that he was also important in the tattoo world.
Yeah, he's like Thom De Vita. They were just artists working through tattooing. Dan Higgs is still just touring, doing his thing. It can almost be a guided meditation.
He does this weird preaching thing too, right? A friend of mine releases a lot of his stuff, Bill Mace. Daniel Higgs has actually come up before.
We could go on... Let's talk about Vacuuming The Gallery, 1949 (2018).
This one is based on a photograph I found on the internet of a gallerist in his gallery in 1947 - this guy called Samuel Kootz. I didn't really know anything about him but it turned out he was an important figure in promoting abstract expressionism in the forties and fifties, he did the first US show for Picasso post-war.

I wanted to do a piece about a gallery with paintings because I like having an excuse to make paintings. I made this piece specifically for this wall [at the Lisson]. It's as big as I can make these light boxes. That's what determined the structure. I made this four panels - my biggest yet - with the intention of making it more immersive. I made the paintings in it based on a Rodchenko drawing. They're all extrapolations of it. These look nothing like it. I just took the image from the internet and started cutting it up and pasting it back together then photographing that and repeating.

This is kind of a continuation from The Gifted Amateur, Nov 10th 1962 (2007) exploring modernist values in painting. I was including sand in the paint in order to create this texture - something that they also used in the forties. I wanted their texture in the lightbox to be very clear, because the photographs are made up of hundreds of images it requires something like this to bring out a strong texture with the light coming through.
I remember hearing you discuss switching from film to digital and the realisation that through using this medium you could pack your work full of so many more details. The depth here almost makes the room start to flex when you look at the difference between the angles in the images and the angles in the room. It's something I wanted to discuss with you, the idea of coming from a conceptual background and needing an excuse to make paintings. The idea that once you subscribe to having a strong conceptual language, you need to justify painting, to give yourself a reason to do it? That's something I can personally identify with.
Yeah, that's something that came from my teachers - my friends, Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall. Being a couple of years older than me, they had passed through that painting phase naturally. When I started at the University of British Columbia, it was Photo-Conceptual. Conceptual art was the main focus. I come from a slightly literary predilection so that was galvanising to me - the possibilities of art from a conceptual perspective.

I didn't go through a painting phase, it was only later that I began looking at painting. I was always more on the Duchamp side than Picasso. It took a long time for me to start dabbling in painting but it's something I very much enjoy doing. Are you a painter?
No, I started out as a painter but my own work is conceptually focused, mostly audiovisual and installation. I started as an abstract painter but one day I just couldn't do it anymore, it just felt pointless. I totally identify with this idea of needing to create a justification for doing something. I thought something that you'd said before about moving from being anti-studio to someone who is never away from their studio was interesting within this context. It's almost performative in itself, like having a studio is a justification of being an artist because you are in your artist's studio. Almost like when you're in your studio you're performing as an artist?
Yeah, having a proper studio changed things completely for me. I kind of took pride in doing stuff in my living room, sending specs out to have sculptures made or whatever. Just having a studio changed things.

There is a performative aspect too. Also a practice space for music or whatever. I love doing music, it's like a super serious hobby.
Could you tell me more about the actual paintings as well?
I was hesitant to put the paintings in the room with the light boxes. It's hard to pair the light boxes with other things.
I could see that. They're very dominant pieces but I feel like the inclusion of the physical paintings do add to this feeling of a gallery within a gallery. It ties the experience together.
The weird open angle in this room creates a weird continuum panorama. It opens up with the wall that the paintings are on.
It's also at odds with he angles of the room in Vacuuming The Gallery. It creates a sort of distortion. It initially looks like the paintings in the images and the paintings on the actual walls are the same. As your eyes switch between them you notice the angular dissonance between the two spaces - something interesting when you're in a gallery looking at a fake gallery that actually was a real gallery full of fake paintings that are actually real paintings. It's an unusual framework in which to parse an exhibition.
These light boxes and the paintings around them had me thinking about the work in terms of texture and application and line, something that I wouldn't be immediately drawn to in general - but at the time when the fictional artist made these works, these were almost the the be all end all in discussing painting. It's interesting that these works shifted my critical perspective. It re-contextualised my thinking within the space. Your performing as the artist in the 1940s gets me performing as a viewer within the 1940s.

I also wanted to maintain this domestic feel. A lot of those 57th Street New York galleries were just converted apartments. You can see the filled-in fireplace in the fourth panel. In the actual photo of Kootz, he's sat in the corner smoking a pipe. I wanted to change it because I think there's something very self-satisfied looking about smoking a pipe that goes well with the vacuuming. I liked the way that the vacuum flowed across the first three panels. The formal aspect of making these things is really fun. I'm dealing with very determinate divisions in terms of what size the boxes can be so I like to play with them in some ways.
Looking at the suit and the pipe with the vacuum, I kind of saw it as a control thing. This is my gallery, I made this happen and it's up to me to make sure everything is correct. Abstract expressionism was a very serious time. This seems like the kind of thing that would have happened.
I never thought of that. He's almost manspreading across the space, taking up so many of the panels with the vacuum cleaner.
And the next piece is Tattooed Man On Balcony?
This piece came out of the Mallarmé poem cascading across the page and the tattoo idea that we were talking about earlier. I liked the idea of getting a lot of these Popeye universe characters made into temporary tattoos, putting them on this rockabilly guy who was obsessed with this old school kind of tattoo. I liked the style. It was very bold. Also, this kind of architecture is something that you see in Vancouver a lot, this suburban style - sometimes called the Vancouver special.

This house is based on a sort of 50s or 60s bungalow that's very common in Vancouver. I guess it also looks kind of like an apartment in Miami. He has his barbecue here, he's into a sort of retro vibe. I just wanted to explore this character that is present in Vancouver and I suppose, across North America. Similar to the aesthetic presence of the next piece.
[Screen Door, 2005] Yes, you had this cast in solid silver, right?
R: Yeah, it was made before the crash. There was this auction of Elvis memorabilia where they were selling some really funny stuff: top loading VCRs with monty python videos, his Texaco card, his golf cart - all this unusual stuff. One item was the screen door from the back of Graceland. It was aluminium.

I totally kicked myself for missing the auction. It was re-auctioned recently and I missed it again. This piece is based on it. I had to work from photographs and I got some screen doors from Vancouver for reference as well. This sort of door is ubiquitous across North America. I really wish I had the Elvis one to see if I managed to get it exact or not.
Is there a relationship between these two pieces? The idea of replicating classic Americana as it becomes less prevalent?
Not really, it was just something I was used to seeing around Vancouver and thought of it as being a beautiful object. It's not something I often do, seeing something and having it made in solid silver but I wanted it in the show because of the smaller piece upstairs [The poker table featuring a silver slipcase containing a copy of Robinson Crusoe]. This is sort of atypical of my work.
This was one of the pieces that I had the most trouble with figuring out, compared to the light boxes, there really aren't so many clues as to what you're looking at. Like the table upstairs?
The table upstairs actually relates to a lot of the earlier work that I was making. I worked a lot with a publisher friend of mine in Belgium, choosing a book and making a sculptural slipcase for it. It goes back to my earliest work, I actually conceived it about twenty years ago. I wish that I had the original drawing, I gave it to him and he said, I've found a really good book - this copy of Robinson Crusoe. It's the first Arabic translation - in fact the first Arabic translation of a work of European fiction - kind of a rare book. The slipcase was actually made by his dentist. I wanted to display it on this sort of fold out Sheraton games table on top of this carpet, alongside the film. The mechanism of the slipcase is shown in the film, to preserve it.

Installation view of Rodney Graham: Central Questions of Philosophy, Lisson Gallery, London (3 October - 3 November 2018) Photographer George Darrell. © Rodney Graham; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
Could we talk about Unused Prop: French Telephone (2018)?
Yeah, this piece is based on the Martin Scorsese film The King Of Comedy. There's a scene where Jerry Lewis has a gun to his ear and to his other ear he's got this gold telephone, wearing these aviator glasses. I originally thought it'd be fun to do it as an album cover for the record I'm always working on... I bought it online and it looks identical to the one in the film. It was just sat on this scuzzy table and I thought I'd take a picture. If you google 'French telephone' these photos come up for some reason. I don't understand what's necessarily French about it but there you go.
I also wanted to ask you about the Smoke Break series [A series of photographic works in which Graham poses as different individuals on break]. I love the old punker one, it's such a ubiquitous image within subcultural spaces. I have a theory about the series in relation to the Liberty Cafe [The cafe owned by Graham in Vancouver]. Owning a cafe is the perfect excuse to people watch. You end up with this battery of subjects to pull from just by being able to be there all the time. Did that have anything to do with you taking it over?
Wow, that's kind of creepy in a way. I do go every day and sit there every day. It's all free for me, which is cool. The people watching is fun for me, yeah.
I guess becoming a studio artist, this is a way for you to reintegrate with the cultures you're inspired by? The observation of routine seems to be an undercurrent in your work.
Well I actually came across the inspiration for this work Central Questions Of Philosophy (2018) on Twitter. Someone tweeted this picture of AJ Ayres. I was interested in it and discovered that there were two version of the cover obviously from the same photo session - one with the dog and one without.

Although I read Language, Truth and Logic years ago, it's not directly about that. I was interested in the idea of the Philosopher with this animal but everyone thinks I look like some US Senator or something. I wanted to work with an animal. It ties in with the Robinson Crusoe work, using a dog.

I wanted it to be pretty exact. I had to get this chair reupholstered with the flame stitch pattern and we had to raise the back up in Photoshop to make it match. The uncanny thing is, to keep them uniform, we used the same head. So my head was just Photoshopped off my shoulders and onto the others.

The last piece in the show is called Black Tapestry (2018). It's this record called Tapestry by Carole King. She was a hit songwriter in the 1960s along with her husband. She moved to Topanga Canyon to reinvent herself as a singer-songwriter and she released this album in the early 1970s.

This album is kind of iconic for North American people my age. She's sitting by the window in her Topanga Canyon pad in her 70s jeans and I just wanted to give it a goth vibe. I'd been doing work on vintage record covers for a while, experimenting using inks, making monochromes and just letting a little bit of the image poke through. You start pulling the ink from the cover around with the brush and it can look really interesting. Sometimes it sinks into the cover.

The first edition was meant to look kind of like a watercolour on textured paper and subsequent editions were very different. It was a lot of fun to do and I liked the title Black Tapestry, taking Carole King and giving her this kind of goth or black metal vibe. I found some of them on eBay. They're ubiquitous in thrift stores throughout North America. It's one of those albums that you just see everywhere.
That reminds me, did you see Mandy [The psychedelic horror film featuring Nicholas Cage] yet?
Oh yeah, that's from a Vancouver guy. I didn't see it yet, I'm a bit of a wimp when it comes to horror movies.
I could talk about Nicholas Cage all day but there's something interesting about this in relation to the way you're painting. You're painting from this sort of place as the 'Other'. I think painting is something that gives you a great deal of personal license to experience this subject matter. Any feelings that you had in relation to this record will be coming up over and over again, each time you make a new version. I suppose you must have developed an entirely new relationship with the music and the imagery. Any personal experience you had must have been magnified?
It's true what you said about needing an excuse, being a conceptual artist and coming from a conceptual perspective. In a way, painting is like a calling. It's something that takes a lifetime - you get better at it so fast but I missed out on the development stage. I could never attain any kind of mastery at my age, but whatever...
Rodney Graham, Central Questions of Philosophy, is at the Lisson Gallery, London, until 3 November

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The Quietus | Features | Craft/Work | Confessions Of A Window Cleaner: Rodney Graham Interviewed

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Installation view of Rodney Graham: Central Questions of Philosophy, Lisson Gallery, London (3 October - 3 November 2018) Photographer George Darrell. © Rodney Graham; Courtesy Lisson Gallery Rodney Graham is definably an interdisciplinary artist, examining nuances in cultural and historical threads across a variety of media, including performance, music, sculpture, painting and video.

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Will The Real Rodney Graham Please Stand Up: That's Not Me At IMMA - 2018

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Will The Real Rodney Graham Please Stand Up: That's Not Me At IMMA - 2018

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The Quietus | Features | Craft/Work | Will The Real Rodney Graham Please Stand Up: That’s Not Me At IMMA

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At the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, John Quin faces multiple Rodney Grahams through which the Canadian artist reveals his obsessions with time and dead media

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Rodney Graham: That’s him in the picture - 2018

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Rodney Graham: That’s him in the picture - 2018

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The Irish Museum of Modern Art has previously held exhibitions by Jeff Wall and Stan Douglas, two of the foremost figures to emerge from what became known as the Vancouver School of conceptual photography in the 1980s.

Wall and Douglas share a basic conviction that the photographic image, and indeed instances of practically every other form of media from books to songs, films to television news programmes, are culturally determined constructs. Both artists make elaborately staged photographic tableaux that are on the scale of epic history paintings or cinematic projections. They aim to elucidate the myriad cultural and political underpinnings of the images and ideas we habitually consume, and often refer back to art history or popular media sources. Wall has stuck to photography, whereas Douglas has also worked with film and performance.

Now another artist associated with the Vancouver School, Rodney Graham, is showing at Imma in That's Not Me. The title is a typical pun, because the person we see most in his work is him. He is unmistakably affiliated to his contemporaries.

There are overlaps in methodology and interests, all the more obviously so given that he is an obsessively referential artist. Practically everything he does refers directly to a source text or work and features a Chinese box-like structure of references within references.

With his teacher, Ian Wallace, and Wall, he was a member of the punk band U-J3RK5. He still produces music but regards it as quite distinct from his visual art. Made with a camera obscura, an inverted photograph of a tree - a reference to the fact that, optically, the world is upside-down until the brain adjusts the picture - established him as an artist and signalled the way his mind works. He went on to make very involved text-based conceptual pieces (to the extent of writing a novel) before finding his way back to film and, more recently, large-scale, staged photographic lightboxes.

Cyclical structures

He is undoubtedly best known for one film, made in 1997. Vexation Island is a relatively simple, looped narrative - he loves cyclical structures - in which a castaway (Graham), under a coconut tree repeatedly wakes up, shakes the tree and knocks himself out with a falling coconut.

Though it is not included in the Imma show, it was a hit (so to speak) at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Its deadpan humour, not all that far removed from an insistent, irritating literalness, is characteristic.

An earlier film, not that dissimilar in many ways, is at Imma. Halcion Sleep (1994), signalled the arrival of the artist as a performer in his own work, something that has continued ever since. We see him sleeping, stretched out on the back seat of a car as it travels through Vancouver at night.

His journey began in a suburban motel, where he took a dose of sleeping pills, the Halcion of the title, from where he was transported back to his city-centre home, asleep (in the event, he edited out the set-up and the conclusion). He had in mind the reversal of an archetypal plot device in thrillers: a protagonist is drugged and abducted, groggily waking up in strange surroundings.

Halcion Sleep is strangely, ambiguously atmospheric: it's hard to decide if it's peaceful or troubling, an effect enhanced by Graham's decision not to show us the beginning and end of the process.

His range is indicated by another, rather beautiful film projected at the end of the corridor. Torqued Chandelier Release, made in 2005, has two main sources: Isaac Newton's rotational motion experiment with a rope and a bucket of water being one, and a scene from the 1952 period romantic, sword-fighting film Scaramouche, in which the title character is nearly impaled by a falling chandelier, being the other.

Graham twisted a rope from which a crystal chandelier was suspended and filmed it revolving as the rope unwinds, then winds a little in the other direction, and so on. It distinctly recalls the tone of conceptual film works from the late 1960s and 1970s.

To say that he filmed it is probably an overstatement. As he has pointed out, he doesn't even own a camera and usually employs people to do the photographic work. He prepares the settings and plays a role. That's the methodology for the lightboxes, many of which are on view. The source can be a painting - not necessarily a good painting - or a chance event.

The Avid Reader stems from the latter, a scene glimpsed in the street. A three-part lightbox, cinematic in scale, it features a man reading the pages of newspaper used to line the windows of a closed Woolworths store, while a woman walks by the façade. He plays the role of the man, and his wife, Shannon Oksanen, herself an artist, is the woman strolling by.

It has the enlarged hyper-reality of cinema, with everything illuminated, almost glowing, and precisely focused. We are looking at a set, constructed in Graham's studio. It is, he says, a recreation of a 1949 storefront, and the papers the man is studying date from 1945, following the end of the second World War. Incidentally, there is an echo here of the work of Douglas, who is fascinated by the prewar and postwar era in Canada.

Despite the historical precision of his image, though, Graham does not seem to share Douglas's interest with how issues of race and class are built into the structure of a society.

Does that make him a more superficial artist? Not necessarily, though the imposing physical scale of many of the lightboxes does seem at variance with their often slight import. But then, that could be part of the joke, and there is plenty to occupy the eye and the mind in a show of several genuine highlights.

That's Not Me - Rodney Graham. Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin. Until February 18th. imma.ie

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Rodney Graham: That's him in the picture

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The Irish Museum of Modern Art has previously held exhibitions by Jeff Wall and Stan Douglas, two of the foremost figures to emerge from what became known as the Vancouver School of conceptual photography in the 1980s.

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Rodney Graham: That’s Not Me review – starring role in his own method-acting dramas -  2017

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Rodney Graham: That’s Not Me review – starring role in his own method-acting dramas -  2017

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Rodney Graham: That’s Not Me review – starring role in his own method-acting dramas

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The Canadian artist goes the long way round to create wry and deeply complex videos, films and photographs that keep the viewer guessing

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Drugged, kidnapped and cast away: the funny, disturbing obsessions of Rodney Graham - 2017

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Drugged, kidnapped and cast away: the funny, disturbing obsessions of Rodney Graham - 2017

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omeone recently likened one of my large-scale photographic works to a mildly humorous father's day card," says Rodney Graham, chuckling. "I thought that was the funniest thing." Many of Graham's more deadpan photographic works could indeed pass for old-fashioned father's day cards. Cactus Fan, from 2013, features him as a white-coated scientist staring intently at a gift-wrapped cactus with four brightly coloured balloons attached. It is as if he is trying to figure out scientifically what it means, what the relationship might be between the cactus spikes and the helium-filled balloons.

Cactus Fan, 2013 by Rodney Graham. Photograph: Ken Adlard/Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Canadian Humorist, from the previous year, features Graham leaning on an Arne Jacobsen chair in a white polo neck. Next to him is a tea trolley bearing biscuits and a brightly patterned tea cosy. He is wearing fluffy slippers like a Canadian Alan Partridge. "The humour is there," he says, "but I think of it almost in terms of a defence mechanism. Plus, it is a really difficult thing to pull off. You could go too far with slapstick - but I can't do slapstick, so that's not an issue. I'm not really an expressive person. I don't have any talent for acting, so the deadpan element is kind of me."

In the flesh, Graham is not so much deadpan as diffident. Over tea in London's National Gallery cafe, he speaks quietly and with a certain hesitance, as if unsure language can convey the full complexity of his tumbling thoughts. His work - like that of his Vancouver compatriots Jeff Wall and Stan Douglas - is unapologetically cerebral, filled with clever visual puns and nods to other work.

Graham is in London to oversee a small exhibition at Canada House entitled Canadian Impressionist - a reference to the characters he plays in his conceptual photographs and films, rather than his painting style. A major retrospective, That's Not Me, is also about to open at the Baltic in Gateshead. "It's not accurately a retrospective," he points out, sounding almost apologetic, "because there's not much early stuff. I kind of went along with what the curator wanted. One floor will have silent film pieces, the other some large-scale, light-box photographic works and a small selection of books and records."

Graham has been performing his deadpan songs almost as long as he has been making art, but sadly Baltic visitors will not get to hear any apart from at one special evening performance near the end of the run in May. "My music doesn't really fit in the gallery," he says. "It's not like a Martin Creed thing. It's just a kind of fantasy hobby. I don't see it as an extension of my art. I approach it as a separate pursuit." He has been playing with the same musicians for almost 20 years: the Rodney Graham Band is about to release a new record, Gondoliers, a follow-up to Good Hand, Bad Hand.

If you balk at the very thought of artists indulging their rock'n'roll fantasies, prepare to be pleasantly surprised. One not untypical song, Walking to Walgreens, begins: "Here's a thought - Miami's hot / I'm walking to Walgreens in flip-flops." It's like Pavement, but looser and funnier. "I really struggle to write lyrics," says Graham. "They always come last. I think it's because I have nothing to say, really."

Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, and grew up with "a vague idea of becoming a writer or an artist". At university in the late 1970s, he was taught by the artist Ian Wallace, with whom he also played in a band - UJ3RK5, pronounced You Jerks - alongside Wall. "Post-punk galvanised us in Vancouver, " he says, suddenly almost excited. "We were into Devo and we actually supported Gang of Four when they played in Canada."

Like Wall, Graham is very much a product of Vancouver's then-thriving photo-conceptual scene, making large, backlit, staged tableaux that often referenced classical paintings even as they resembled ultra-real documentary photographs. Ever since, his art has remained unapologetically referential - to art history, literature, cinema, psychoanalysis and pop culture.

Pop culture ... The Gifted Amateur, Nov 10th, 1962 (2007) by Rodney Graham. Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

His earliest works, including one in which he used a shed on his uncle's farm to project an inverted image of a tree, were made using a camera obscura. Then, in 1983, he created Lenz, inwhich he rearranged the pages of the Georg Büchner novel of the same name into a kind of labyrinthine Borgesian loop that echoed the original protagonist's psychological crisis as he wandered through a forest.

Ten years later, Graham designed Reading Machine for Lenz, a rotating machine that accentuates the disruption of the text and, by extension, the disorientation of the character. The deadpan humour of Cactus Fan, meanwhile, is undercut by its knowingness: it is a homage to The Cactus Enthusiast, a 19th-century painting by Carl Spitzweg in which a gardener stares at a cactus that appears to be staring back at him.

Graham's favourite writer is Raymond Roussel, the French avant-garde novelist whose work abounded in puns, footnotes, wordplay and annotations and the artist has written a kind of meta-novel, The System of Landor's Cottage, that riffs on Edgar Allan Poe final story, Landor's Cottage. There is a certain obsessiveness in his approach, I suggest, in its meticulous formalism and willingness to explore often obscure thinkers. "Maybe," he says. "Maybe."

'No talent for acting' ... Rodney Graham's Dance!!!! 2008. Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Graham began using himself as a character in his work in 1994, when he made the still disturbing Halcion Sleep. In it, he is driven - unconscious - from a motel in the suburbs to his city centre home, having taken sleeping pills. "I wanted to make this inversion of the film noir trope, in which the hero is drugged and kidnapped and taken to the outskirts of town, where he wakes up disoriented in a shack. I instructed my brother and his friend to drive me into town and put me to bed. But the footage was so unsightly, I just used the driving part with me slumped unconscious."

By surrendering control of his own project, Graham also subverted the conventional role of the artist. Still, it seems like an extreme thing to do. "I guess so," he says, "but, as I said, I'm not any good at acting, even acting unconscious. I was actually very depressed at the time. Initially, I wanted to use ether to knock myself out, so I went to see Jeff Wall's father, who was a doctor. He said, 'There are three stages of unconsciousness and the third is death. Don't do it.'"

Graham's breakout piece was Vexation Island, a film made for the 1997 Venice Biennale, in which he played a castaway on a desert island. It begins slowly, with the character sleeping beneath a palm tree. He wakes up, shakes the tree to loosen a coconut that falls and hits him on the head, rendering him unconscious again. It is Nietzsche's notion of the eternal recurrence, shot in the kind of sumptuously unreal colour that 70s TV advertisers loved.

"It was a make-or-break moment for me," he says. "I sank $50,000 into it and, through a contact I had in Hollywood, managed to get all these movie technicians to fly down to the Virgin Islands and work for free. I just went for it - and went deeply into debt for it - but it changed my work dramatically."

Since then, his deadpan, obsessive, endlessly referential art has moved from the analogue to the digital without surrendering any of its odd, wilfully cerebral charm. "For a recent piece, I created the set of a bookshop in my studio. It is maybe 35-feet deep and, with digital, you can read the words on the books on the back walls. It's nuts, but it's what I always wanted." The work, titled The Antiquarian, depicts a bookseller slumbering in his chair surround by rare books but no customers. "It's based on someone I know in Vancouver," says Graham, smiling, "but it it is also about another route I might have pursued if I hadn't done art."

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Drugged, kidnapped and cast away: the funny, disturbing obsessions of Rodney Graham

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omeone recently likened one of my large-scale photographic works to a mildly humorous father's day card," says Rodney Graham, chuckling. "I thought that was the funniest thing." Many of Graham's more deadpan photographic works could indeed pass for old-fashioned father's day cards.

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Review: Rodney Graham Reflected Anew in NYC, Michael Vass, Canadian Art

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Review: Rodney Graham Reflected Anew in NYC, Michael Vass, Canadian Art

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More than most artists of his age and stature, Rodney Graham has largely avoided branding himself and settling into a repetitive groove of diminishing returns. His prolific, eclectic practice has included painting, sculpture, performance, installation, public art, film, video and photography. However, one area he has returned to frequently in recent years is a kind of ironic self-portrait/self-performance that makes explicit the elements of self-negation, self-concealment and self-invention embedded in any performance or portrait.

This strand first appeared in moving-image works, such as Graham's video Halcion Sleep (1994) and continued in a glossier vein with his celebrated cinematic loops, including Vexation Island (1997), How I Became a Ramblin' Man (1999) and City Self/Country Self (2001).

Graham then shifted to a photographic variation on this theme. The C-print diptych Fishing on a Jetty (2000) featured Graham impersonating Cary Grant in a composition based on a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief. This was followed in 2002 by another diptych self-portrait, Fantasia for Four Hands (2002), in which Graham doubled down on Jeff Wall's Double Self-Portrait (1979) in a composition inspired by album art from the popular easy-listening piano duo Ferrante and Teicher (with an allusion to Yves Klein thrown in for good measure).

With their idiosyncratic references to art history, cinema and 20th-century culture, as well as their conscious repurposing of Wall's "cinematography" methods, Fishing... and Fantasia...can be seen as direct precursors to the series of large-scale light box self-portraits Graham has been making off and on since 2005, and which are accumulating into a major body of work. Often presented as diptychs or triptychs, they feature Graham, meticulously costumed but always recognizable, portraying a variety of characters in elaborately staged period-specific scenes.

Graham's latest exhibition at 303 Gallery in New York featured four recent works in this loose series. The show found the seemingly tireless 64-year-old Graham ruminating playfully on aging, solitude and the unsettling flipside of repose. The press release described the large backlit photographs as a continuation of Graham's "allegorical self-portraiture." However, as with the rest of the series, any autobiographical content seemed secondary to the detailed artifice of Graham's mise en scène. The works attest to Graham's continuing interest in merging the artist's studio with the film studio and assuming the role of auteur/star.

Graham's light boxes, like his film loops, are certainly more accessible than some of his more intellectually ambitious conceptual projects. Indeed, investigating the overlap between "serious" art and "light" entertainment seems to be part of what Graham is up to with these works. With his gift for maintaining a familiar charisma and consistent persona while inhabiting a wide range of characters, Graham's performance style often recalls that of a classic Hollywood movie star (Cary Grant was an apt choice for impersonation).

Though always amusing, Graham's anchoring presence can initially make the works feel a bit one-note, like endless variations of an experiment testing his capacity to project affable, deadpan ambivalence through a variety of settings and character types. However, Graham's performances and compositions reward close consideration and provide a distinct kind of pleasure, which increases in complexity with each new photograph in the series.

Cactus Fan (2013), a single-panel light box on based Carl Spitzweg's 1850 painting The Cactus Enthusiast, features Graham as a scientist in a laboratory staring at a cactus on the countertop. The muted green of the cactus matches the tones of the fluorescent-lit lab, but the plant pot is wrapped in bright yellow paper and decorated with colourful helium balloons, the festive childishness of which contrasts with the antiseptic setting.

Standing a few steps back from the apparent gift with his arms crossed, Graham's scientist regards this alien presence of life with an intense but ambivalent gaze signalling perhaps fascination, perhaps consternation. However one reads his expression, characterizing him as a "fan" strikes an amusingly discordant note similar to the irony of Spitzweg's title in relation to the stooped, bulbous figure in his painting.

Old Punk on Pay Phone (2012), also a single panel, is a study of concealment as character expression. As the old punk, Graham's face is mostly hidden behind the receiver of the pay phone, but his wide eyes, his alert posture and his wardrobe speak volumes. The combat boots, the wallet chain with oversized safety pin, the eyeliner, the spiked grey hair and the studded black leather jacket all appear as a kind of character armour, at once an aggressive form of self-expression and an elaborate protective disguise. Bright blue and yellow graffiti on the brick wall acts as a vibrant Lichtenstein-esque Pop art backdrop. As with the balloons in Cactus Fan, the youthful blast of colour undermines the carefully constructed identity of the protagonist, making him seem both more ridiculous and more sympathetic.

The Drywaller (2012) is a diptych featuring Graham as the title character taking a smoke break while casually standing on work stilts. The black and red of his plaid shirt in the left panel rhymes with the black space heater bearing glowing orange filaments in the right panel, while an off-white wall marked with a grid pattern and dots stretches across both panels. This faux-Abstract Expressionist backdrop, along with the listless expression worn by Graham's worker and the incidental vaudeville of his stilts, emphasizes in a darkly humourous manner that this is, decidedly, a portrait of a non-artist as an aging man. As artist/performer, Graham can be both in on the joke and the butt of it at the same time-a move he pulls off in all of these works.

At 18 feet wide, the triptych Paddler, Mouth of the Seymour (2012-13) is the largest work in the exhibition, though the only one with the figure presented at significantly less than human scale. Graham occupies the centre panel as a white-bearded kayaker floating in front of an old bridge. It's hard to say what the paddler's odd look signifies, except that it is the opposite of peaceful and content.

The composition is based pretty directly on Thomas Eakins's 1871 painting The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), though Graham shifts the blue-dominant tones of the original to a more autumnal register to go along with the increase in age of Eakins's youthful competitive rower to Graham's late-middle-aged hobbyist.

Aesthetically, Paddler ... was the most complex work in the exhibition. The rich array of greens, browns and oranges provided by the foliage in the left panel are picked up by the rusted bridge and wooden kayak in the centre panel, where they bleed into the reflection of the turquoise water before the pale blue of the sky takes over in the right panel. The hyperreal aesthetic Graham achieves is like a Technicolor reimagining of 19th-century painting-Thomas Eakins meets Douglas Sirk.

Whether Graham's "allegorical self-portraiture," in moving or in still imagery, adds up to a fragmentarily revealing self-portrait or a series of sly allegories on the pleasures of perpetual evasion inherent in inhabiting and constructing images is a question that remains open. One might suspect that pursuing variations of this ambiguity over dozens of works would eventually lead to that rut of diminishing returns Graham has thus far avoided. And yet, as 303 Gallery's exhibition demonstrated, his seemingly limitless reservoir of scenarios and characters continues to command fresh admiration and, perhaps more importantly, continues to entertain.

-Michael Vaas

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Review: Rodney Graham Reflected Anew in NYC, Michael Vass, Canadian Art

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More than most artists of his age and stature, Rodney Graham has largely avoided branding himself and settling into a repetitive groove of diminishing returns. His prolific, eclectic practice has included painting, sculpture, performance, installation, public art, film, video and photography.

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Rodney Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada in 1949. He graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1971 and lives and works in Vancouver.

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Rodney Graham: Literature and What an Artist Does With It

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Rodney Graham: Literature and What an Artist Does With It

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Rodney Graham’s Unexpected Interrupters - 2020

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Rodney Graham’s Unexpected Interrupters - 2020

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graham rodney and nauman bruce 'the nearest faraway place' exhibition guide 2001

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graham rodney and nauman bruce 'the nearest faraway place' exhibition guide 2001

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Rodney Graham, A Little Thought, March 30-June 27, 2004, ArtGallery of Ontario

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Rodney Graham, A Little Thought, March 30-June 27, 2004, ArtGallery of Ontario

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Rodney Graham's works humourously consider notions of doubling and historical modes of self-representation. Graham is part of a generation of Vancouver artists, including Ken Lum, Roy Arden, Stan Douglas and also Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall, with whom he played with in the punk band U-J3RK5. These artists established the city's reputation for photoconceptualism.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive

Rodney Graham's breakthrough works, completed after studying at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University, were a series of images of inverted trees made with a camera obscura. Later, in the '90s, Graham became known for appearing in short, looped films in which he parodied and problematized modern or proto-modern notions of selfhood and masculinity. For "Media Studies" his solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Zürich, Graham presents a new series of his signature photographic lightbox works. The works are allegorical and witty compositions focusing on his use of the self-portrait to explore scenarios from our collective cultural memory. In addition, two new collage series that reference Graham's artistic personae and career as musician are displayed for the first time. In the lightbox works each image is a fictional self-portrait with the artist in costume always recognizable, portraying a vast array of characters, each scene is purposefully constructed and executed with an exceptional degree of technical expertise and humor. In "Dinner Break (Salisbury Steak)" (2017), Graham takes the guise of a '60s jazz drummer breaking for dinner during a performance at a nightclub, his hands poised with knife and fork above the plate as if they were drumsticks. The set for "Antiquarian Sleeping in His Shop" (2017) is drawn from visits to various antique shops around Vancouver,Graham plays a collector sleeping amongst the menagerie of objects. The "News Paper Spy" (2017) belongs to an ongoing series that utilises newspapers. Here Graham hides cartoonishly behind a newspaper with cut eyeholes, making subtle reference to Marcel Duchamp's famous last work "Étant donnés" (1946-66) and Pablo Picasso's appropriation of African masks. The exhibition also offers the opportunity of viewing two new collage series. They revel in nostalgia and historical pop culture. In the group of small-scale collages on board, glossy images of Dean Martin and Alain Delon ripped from magazines are pasted alongside scraps of texts and vintage adverts, then overlaid with brightly colored spray-paint. The large-scale collages are realised on canvas or linen. The collage elements are drawn from a cache of "Circus", a '80s rock magazine that championed the era's Glam-Metal bands. In some, the magazine pages are attached with gesso, in others, peeled-off revealing a transfer of the image akin to the effect used by Robert Rauschenberg. The musical references in this body of work speak to Graham's bond with and lifelong interest in music and its history.
Info: Hauser & Wirth, Limmatstrasse 270, Zürich, Duration: 21/1-11/3/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.hauserwirth.com

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Rodney Graham's works humourously consider notions of doubling and historical modes of self-representation. Graham is part of a generation of Vancouver artists, including Ken Lum, Roy Arden, Stan Douglas and also Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall, with whom he played with in the punk band U-J3RK5. These artists established the city's reputation for photoconceptualism.

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The Museum Frieder Burda is pleased to present, in close co-operation with the artist himself, an exhibition of his photo...

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Rodney Graham. Lightboxes. Museum Frieder Burda

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Rodney Graham. Lightboxes. Museum Frieder Burda

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Rodney Graham's medium is the classic advertising light box but behind the smooth, shiny surface of illuminated photography, behind the perfectionist scenography, there always lurks a touch of melancholy that tells of the burdens of always playing one's role perfectly in the theater of life. We seldom see a smile, the object rarely looks us in the eye. He happily drifts off into nothing, into the distance or into the past.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Museum Frieder Burda Archive

Since the '70s, Rodney Graham has been working on a rhizome-like, conceptual oeuvre that has never shied away from new jumps in time or genre. His work combines film, photography, installation, performance, painting, literature and music. Graham, who, along with artists such as Jeff Wall or Stan Douglas, belongs to the Vancouver School, appropriates styles, trends and discourses from the era of romanticism through to post-modernity, commenting or expanding on them or rethinking them with an understated irony. His sources of inspiration range from greats such as Sigmund Freud, Richard Wagner or Edgar Allan Poe to pop icons like Kurt Cobain. In the process, he simultaneously reveals and conceals his own artistic self-image, attitudes or feelings. In his solo exhibition "Lightboxes" at Museum Frieder Burda presents light boxes, a central medium in his complex oeuvre,that range from 2000 to the present. The exhibition begins with the monumental triptych "Antiquarian Sleeping in his Shop" (2017). In it, Graham portrays a collector who has nodded off while reading in his store, which is decorated with antiques and curios. Graham collected the props for the project himself in the antique and bric-a-brac shops of Vancouver. His work can be viewed as a multi-layered allegory for a retreat to eclectic styles and nostalgic inner worlds. His " Media Studies 77" (2016), which is being displayed on the mezzanine, seems like a parody of media research and academia in the post-factual world we live in today. In this case, Graham adopts the role of a dandy-like professor. If the medium is the message, as postulated by the Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan in 1964, it, along with its entire discourses, has been reduced to a simple surface. The screen is dark, the blackboards are blank, the only message in the entire room is the self-staging of the teacher. At the same time, Graham transforms this scene into a surface composition with abstract and monochrome elements. Upstairs in the museum are key works from the last decades, light boxes, many of which feature Graham's best-known incarnations. They include, for example, the roles of the amateur painter, the camera salesman, the craftsman, the rambling man and the cowboy. All of Graham's light boxes, including his still-life-like arrangements, teem with references. He constantly undermines the lines between high and mass culture and connects banal, everyday contexts with elaborate allusions to art history and intellectual history.
Info: Curator: Patricia Kamp, Museum Frieder Burda, Lichtentaler Allee 8b, Baden-Baden, Duration: 8/7-26/11/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.museum-frieder-burda.de

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Rodney Graham's medium is the classic advertising light box but behind the smooth, shiny surface of illuminated photography, behind the perfectionist scenography, there always lurks a touch of melancholy that tells of the burdens of always playing one's role perfectly in the theater of life.

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Rodney Graham: That's Not Me: BALTIC Documentary

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Rodney Graham | Studio Visit | TateShots