Rodney Graham’s oeuvre spans photography, film, music, performance and painting. His work often takes the form of series and tends to reference art history, literature, philosophy and popular culture, from Lewis Carroll to Sigmund Freud to Kurt Cobain. Graham’s challenging avant-garde experiments and sense of humour betray his roots in the late-70s, post-punk scene in Vancouver, which became a source of inspiration for a younger generation of artists. Graham assumed different guises in his work, playfully and theatrically exploring contemporary art history and culture.
Born in a small town in British Columbia, Graham moved to Vancouver with his parents when he was fifteen. He studied art history, anthropology and English and French literature at the University of British Columbia. Graham is closely associated with the Vancouver School, which emerged in the 1980s and revolved around post-conceptual photography. Stan Douglas, Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall are also associated with the school. Graham distinguished himself from the latter artists, for example, by adopting a more performative approach to film and photography.
Graham made his first major series of photographs in 1976. Entitled 75 Polaroids, he took the images during nocturnal walks in the forests around Vancouver. He exhibited the photos in his first solo exhibition at the city’s Pender Gallery, which launched his artistic career. 75 Polaroids already contains many of the elements that became essential to his later oeuvre, such as a fascination with photographic processes that transform objects from mere representations to autonomous images. Graham’s interest in obsolete technologies regularly resurfaced in the 1980s and 1990s, which led him to work with camera obscuras and other optical devices, and to approach film as a historical medium. In parallel, Graham also worked on conceptual and physical series that were based on books. In Reading Machine for Lenz (1993), for example, he incorporated books into optical devices and also created minimalist, Donald Judd-like sculptures, as ‘cabinets’ for Freud’s collected works.
While Graham was already well-known for his photographic research on the ‘inverted tree’, amongst other things, it wasn’t until the 1997 Venice Biennale that he seriously broke into the art world. He showed his video Vexation Island, based on Hollywood films and the story of Robinson Crusoe, in which he played the role of a 17th-century shipwrecked sailor. Graham made several films in which he assumed the role of a character, often with a simple plot, usually in a loop, always framed by extensive research and made to the highest production standards. His films often play with ideas about the origin and demise of cinema. Towards the end of his career, Graham created increasingly monumental and meticulously staged photographs, inspired by historical paintings or everyday life, which he showed in light boxes. He did not take the photos himself, but can be seen in every shot, in the guise of a fictional character.
Graham also worked on a series of abstract paintings in the early 2000s, including Picasso, My Master (2005), Possible Abstraction (2007) and Inverted Drip Painting (2007). After a long career in which he experimented with literary models, appropriated elements from art history, created impressive video works and monumental, cinematic light boxes, Graham had finally arrived at the classical medium of painting. But he approached it with an ironic distance, thereby creating a playful yet serious homage to the medium. His paintings are therefore inseparable from his artistic characters, historical or otherwise, who also work in the medium. It can thus be said that Graham’s performative and art-historical referencing also extends to his painting practice.
