Rodney Graham
"Rodney Graham" by Andrea Carson, Spring 2008, p. 86
Rodney Graham, who is well known for his portrayals of fictional characters in his films and photographs, has starred in those works as a shipwrecked pirate, a lonesome cowboy and even Cary Grant. In 2006, Graham created a Fluxus-style film, Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong, in which he played the part of an imaginary performance artist. From this character (he says) came “the idea of a back-story [of] a decade of artistic exploration in various media. Naturally the artist started as a painter.”
For this exhibition, Graham has brought the invented yet archetypal character of “the gifted amateur” into the real world as the creator of a new body of paintings. In the front gallery window hang two enormous, stylized graphic artworks made of lacquer and wood, with puffed white frames surrounding squiggly black lines: a cartoon-like interpretation of abstraction. The idea for these pieces came, indeed, from a 1950s cartoon—a silk-screened version of which is hung nearby—in which two men stand before nearly identical works. One says, “If you ask me, his earlier paintings were much better.” Across the gallery hangs a new series of beautiful untitled, antique-framed, Picasso-esque paintings; their abstracted shapes refer to what is being lampooned in the cartoon.
A three-part light box measuring nine by 18 feet in the gallery’s second room anchors the show. In The Gifted Amateur, Nov. 10th, 1962, Graham plays the role of the painter, shown amid typical 1960s Vancouver decor, in the process of pouring bright slashes of paint down a raw canvas in the manner of the Abstract Expressionist Morris Louis, who passed away in 1962.
This is classic Graham—in character, inside an elaborate set that reads as both history and the present moment simultaneously. The Louis-influenced Inverted Drip paintings that appear upstairs are hung upside down, bringing to mind Graham’s inverted photographs of trees (for example Flanders Trees from 1989). Like the tree works, these solemn, jewel-toned ribbons of paint on raw canvas may be read as a reversal of growth, progress and time.
Graham is well known for throwing a loop into linear time—be it in the context of film (in his 1997 Vexation Island, a shipwrecked pirate is knocked out by a coconut, wakes and is knocked out again in a never-ending cycle) or literary narrative (in 1983’s Lenz, a piece of text is looped endlessly upon itself). Here, the conceptual loop occurs outside of the work itself, taking the viewer from the 1960s to the present-day work of a well-known Vancouver artist...
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