Rodney Graham @ 303 Gallery, New York

Rodney Graham
303 Gallery, New York
January 11 - February 23, 2019

303 Gallery announces their ninth exhibition of new work by Rodney Graham.

In a suite of new lightbox works, Rodney Graham continues to probe the semi-conscious creation of cultural archetypes. Begun in 2007, Rodney Graham's lightboxes synthesize and expand upon his practices in painting, photography, sculpture and film, using highly detailed set design and arcane conceptual inspirations to point to the paradigmatic functioning of stock characters from the realms of art, Hollywood film, music, history and the social world.

For Vacuuming The Gallery, 1949, 2018, Rodney Graham's monumental piece takes as its inspiration a photograph of New York gallerist Samuel Kootz smoking a pipe in his own gallery during a Picasso exhibition in 1949. On the walls in this image are a series of Rodney Graham's own abstract paintings, part of a series of variations based on a single watercolor by Alexander Rodchenko (Abstract Composition, 1941). Rodney Graham inhabits a role based on the image of Kootz, vacuuming the floors of his apartment-cum-gallery in a quaint-seeming gesture of domesticity. His taciturn, smug expression seems to translate not only the uptown art dealer persona, but the upending of that persona in performing a menial, unusually gendered task. Rodney Graham's Rodchenko-inspired paintings hang in the current exhibition as well, their anachronistic expressionist tendencies magnified by the contextual disconnect between the tableau the lightbox portrays and the contemporary tendency to view art in a sleek white cube.

Tattooed Man on Balcony, 2018, follows from a poem Rodney Graham penned in the style of Mallarme that was intended as an instructional guide for a tattoo artist. The image described, in which Popeye is clad in a deep-sea diving suit battling a giant squid, has been extended to an entire phalanx of characters from Popeye's compatriots in the Thimble Theater. The man's pompadour and spread-collar, open to the chest 50s-style shirt suggest an aging rockabilly fan whose most whimsical and hardscrabble years are behind him. Perched on the balcony of an apartment featuring a particularly Vancouver-centric brand of vernacular modernism, Graham again creates a strange kind of third-person self-portrait, as if this character is simultaneously himself, a model, and a type of standardized, unconscious prototype - an 'extra' of sorts.

A different type of stock character emerges in Remorseful Hunter, 2019, inspired by a found thrift store painting. Rodney Graham takes the guise of a mountain man with a rifle apparently in the midst of a remorseful existential crisis, sitting on a rock overlooking a Caspar David Fridrich-style landscape. He appears overtaken by sentimentality, a kind of existential Elmer Fudd who suddenly finds himself identified only with a sympathetic squirrel. Another type of "man with beast" portrait exists in Central Questions of Philosophy, 2018, a lightbox work inspired by two versions of the Pelican paperback cover for the philosopher AJ Ayer's titular book. In one version, the philosopher poses stoically in his home with a learned smirk, and in the other, he assumes the same pose, this time with a dog on his lap. The work nods to Ayer's work as a logical empiricist, positing two versions of reality: in one, a philosopher sits in a chair; and in the other, a philosopher and a dog sit in a chair. Graham is Ayer, Ayer is Graham, a dog is a dog is a dog.

RODNEY GRAHAM was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada in 1949. Solo exhibitions include Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany (2017); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands (2017); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2017); Le Constortium, Dijon, France (2016); Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany (2015); Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2012); Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria (2011); and the Museu D’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain (2010). He has participated in group exhibitions such as the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, USA (2013); the 13th, 14th and 17th Sydney Biennales, Australia (2002, 2006, 2010); the Whitney Biennial, New York, USA (2006); and the Biennale d’Art contemporain de Lyon, France (2003). He represented Canada at the 47th Venice Biennale, Italy (1997). He has received the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, Toronto, Canada (2004), the Kurt Schwitters-Preis, Niedersächsiche Sparkassenstiftung, Germany (2006), and the Audain Prize for lifetime achievement in visual arts, British Columbia, Canada (2011). In 2016, Rodney Graham was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada, for his contributions to Canadian contemporary art. He lives and works in Vancouver.

Upcoming: ELAD LASSRY, March 2019, his second exhibition at 303 Gallery.

303 GALLERY

555 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

www.303gallery.com

Rodney Graham @ IMMA - Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

Rodney Graham: That’s Not Me 
IMMA - Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin 
Through 18 February 2018

IMMA presents That’s Not Me, a survey from 1994 to the present, of the work of Canadian artist RODNEY GRAHAM. This is the first major presentation of Rodney Graham’s work in Ireland, focusing on his illuminated lightboxes and film works. Rodney Graham lives and works in Vancouver, Canada and is associated with the 1980s Vancouver School of post-conceptual photography alongside peers such as Jeff Wall and Stan Douglas (who so memorably exhibited in IMMA in 2014). The Vancouver School is a group defined by a style of photography in which moments from art history are replicated. Rodney Graham represented Canada at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 and his work features in significant museum collections around the world including Tate Modern, MoMA and the Centre Pompidou.      

                                    

Rodney Graham is one of the most consistently inventive artists to have emerged in the last 40 years, tirelessly questioning what it means to be an artist today. Through genre-defying experimentalism, Graham’s practice has shifted from conceptual photography and installation to encompass film, performance, music and painting. His works, informed by psychology, literature and storytelling, present cyclical narratives layered with puns and references. Historical figures such as Lewis Carroll, Sigmund Freud, Raymond Roussel and Kurt Cobain are explored with Graham’s typical sense of humour.

The focus in this Dublin exhibition is on Rodney Graham’s illuminated lightboxes, and on his film works. The lightboxes, usually constructed on a monumental scale, elevate the subject matter by making a high level of detail perceptible to the viewer. The scenes depicted are highly stylized, and usually set in the 20th century at a specific time. The form of the lightbox lends itself to close examination, and Graham’s constructed studio sets reward close inspection of newspaper headlines, signage and picture’s within the picture.

Most of the lightbox works feature the artist himself, assuming a variety of roles in meticulously staged environments. In these works, Rodney Graham is playing a series of fictional characters, but this can also be considered a form of self-portraiture. In The Gifted Amateur, Nov. 10th, 1962 (2007) for example, Graham assumes the role of an amateur artist, creating generic abstract works in a Modernist interior. This subversion of the perceived role of the artist shows Graham undermining the popular mythology of the artist and highlighted the constructed nature of identity, while also being a warm tribute to ‘amateur’ art. Adding to the richness of the work is the fact that Graham has exhibited paintings like the one pictured here, further blurring lines between invented and ‘real’ personae. 

Included in the IMMA exhibition are four major film works made between 1994 and 2010: Halcion Sleep (1994), Torqued Chandelier Release (2005), The Green Cinematograph (Programme 1: Pipe smoker and overflowing sink), (2010); and Rheinmetall/Victoria8, (2003). These works speak to Rodney Graham’s interest in experimentation, along with his interest in silent film and seemingly obsolete production and display methods, such as over-sized projection equipment and 16mm and 35mm film.

Other works in the exhibition reference Rodney Graham’s long-time interest in music and music making. Aberdeen (2000) is a slide projection set up as a lo-fi lecture class, consisting of 80 slides with a Syd Barrett-style musical soundtrack by Graham. The work references Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, a band central to the Seattle Grunge scene of the early 1990s. Following his early death by suicide in 1994, Cobain remains a legendary cult figure. For this work, Rodney Graham visited the late singer’s hometown of Aberdeen, a typical small-town on the border between Canada and America.

Rodney Graham has spoken openly on drawing inspiration from a wide range of sources, and freely borrowing techniques and materials from other artists, in particular Ian Wallace, Douglas Gordon and Jeff Wall, all peers or friends of Graham. While these influences are clearly seen in his use of lightboxes and highly controlled set-pieces – both techniques used by other Vancouver artists – this openness is a major part of Graham’s practice as it relates to his collaboration with other artists, writers and musicians.

That’s Not Me is organised in partnership with the Baltic Centre, Gateshead and is presented as part of an on-going initiative, New Art at IMMA, proudly supported by Matheson, which allows IMMA to continue to support artists’ vital work in a strand of programming that recognises and nurtures new and emerging talents, new thinking and new forms of exhibition-making.

Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) 
Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin 8, D08 FW31, Ireland
www.imma.ie

This Is Not a Love Song at La Virreina Image Centre, Barcelona

This Is Not a Love Song
La Virreina Image Centre, Barcelona
22 May - 13 October 2013

La Virreina Image Centre presents This Is Not a Love Song, an exhibition that sets out to trace the genealogy of the relations between pop music and video-creation from the 1960s to today, with the emphasis on those moments in which there was feedback between the two manifestations as they explored the field of experiment, utopia and political incorrectness.

Since the 1960s, various generations of avant-garde artists have integrated into their production processes elements that are related with the attitudes and imaginaries of pop music. Artists of the calibre of Andy Warhol, Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, John Baldessari, Rodney Graham, Tony Oursler, Christian Marclay, Mike Kelley, Douglas Gordon, Jeremy Deller or Damien Hirst, and many more, down to today, have approached this genre in some of their most outstanding works, sometimes even collaborating with different rock bands or recording their own albums. Similarly, leading musicians such as John Lennon, David Bowie, Pete Townshend, Syd Barret, Brian Eno, Alan Vega, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson and members of essential bands of the last two decades, like Sonic Youth, REM, Blur, or Franz Ferdinand all trained at art school before becoming professional musicians.

From this approach and bearing in mind that the origins of video-art run almost parallel to those of pop music, the project is divided into two sections:

1- Pop and video-creation. Shared genealogies

This section includes more than 30 significant works in the history of video art and experimental film from the 1960s to 2013 that are formally and conceptually related to the iconographies of pop and rock, with works by Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, Yayoi Kusama. Dan Graham, Tony Oursler, Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Christian Marclay, Douglas Gordon, Candice Breitz, Jeremy Deller, Mark Leckey, Jon Mikel Euba, Largen & Bread and others.

2- Music for your eyes. Visual arts and the aesthetics of the videoclip

This section is a journey through the history of the musical videoclip to review the careers of the most important authors of the last 40 years and their connections with contemporary visual arts and cinema and includes a programme of music videos by artists like Andy Warhol, Tony Oursler, Judith Barry, Robert Longo, Joan Morey, Damien Hirst, Ana Laura Aláez, Carles Congost, Pipilotti Rist, Dara Birnbaum, Joseph Beuys, Adel Abidin, Hugo Alonso, Charles Atlas, Marc Bijl, Olaf Breuning, Charley Case, Cheryl Donegan, Jorge Galindo i Santiago Sierra, Jesús Hernández, Bjørn Melhus, César Pesquera, John Sanborn, Kit Fitzgerald (Antarctica), etc.

Curator: F. Javier Panera

 This is Not a Love Song: Interfaces between Visual Arts and Pop Music

Exhibition Catalogue

Exhibition co-produced by Screen Projects / La Virreina Centre de la Imatge / Primavera Sound

La Virreina Centre de la Imatge
Palau de la Virreina
La Rambla, 99 - 08002 Barcelona
http://lavirreina.bcn.cat/

Rodney Graham, Madison Art Center - Films and Videos Retrospective

Rodney Graham
Madison Art Center
March 9 - May 25, 2003

The Madison Art Center presents the first North American retrospective of the films and videos of Vancouver-based artist Rodney Graham. In six works dating from 1994 through 2001, Graham explores the power of film and the nature of illusion. The exhibition touches on the mechanics of cinema as well as the lasting appeal of such well-known genres as the Western and the adventure movie.

In Corruscating Cinnamon Granules (1996), an apparent celestial vision is revealed to be the result of spreading household spice on an electric cooking element in a darkened kitchen. As with much of the artist’s output, the works transcend the apparent banality of their subject matter to raise profound questions about nature, technology and the human condition in a highly engaging and original way.

A trilogy of short Hollywood-inspired 35mm films starring the artist himself forms the centerpiece of the exhibition. In Vexation Island (1997), How I Became a Ramblin’ Man (1999) and City Self/Country Self (2000), Rodney Graham appears in various historical guises performing simple, ritualized actions that run the gamut from maudlin to slapstick. The events depicted are made all the more enigmatic—though no less captivating—by the fact that the films are viewed on a continuous loop.

The exhibition is framed by two works in which Graham embarks on solitary journeys. Halcion Sleep (1994) is a single-take video of the pajama-clad artist asleep in the back of a van as it travels the outskirts of Vancouver. The Phonokinetoscope (2001), Graham’s latest film, has the artist bicycling through a Berlin park after taking a hallucinogenic.

Documentary in style, these works forgo the psychedelia typically associated with altered states, focusing instead on the social and historical underpinnings of escapism.

At 53, Rodney Graham is prototypical of a generation of artists to come of age in the 1970s: conceptually oriented, fluent in various media, and highly literate in both academic and popular culture. While the artist has said he would like to have been a writer or a musician, in fact he not only scripts but records the soundtracks for his films. But Graham may best be described as a philosopher for the twenty-first century, or a kind of Everyman for the Information Age—equally at home with Freud and MTV, making meaning where art and entertainment meet. 

Rodney Graham’s work has been the subject of numerous museum and gallery exhibitions throughout North America and Europe, including a major survey last fall at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. In 1997 Rodney Graham represented Canada in the Venice Biennale. A photographer as well as a film maker and recording artist, he is best known for an ongoing series of large-format photographs of inverted oak trees.

Rodney Graham is organized by the Madison Art Center. The exhibition has been made possible through the generous support of J.H. Findorff & Son Inc.; the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission with additional funds from the Madison Community Foundation and the Overture Foundation; the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation; Duncan Highsmith; The Art League of the Madison Art Center; the Exhibition Initiative Fund; the Madison Art Center’s 2002-2003 Sustaining Benefactors; and a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin.

MADISON ART CENTER
211 State Street, Madison WI 53703
www.madisonartcenter.org

Trance: Hypnotic Video Art

Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Trance, An Exhibition Of Hypnotic Contemporary Video

Although rapid, MTV-style editing may be the mode most commonly associated with contemporary video, a significant number of notable video artists are exploring more deliberate and slowly paced approaches to the medium. Trance: New Work in Video, an exhibition on view from October 6, 1998 through January 10, 1999, will feature seven works made by artists during the 1990s.

The videos in Trance have been edited using techniques such as slow motion and repetition to produce powerful and hypnotic effects. Projected directly onto a large screen, each video will be shown for a period of two weeks. Trance will be on view in the Video Gallery 179 on the first floor.

Featured artists include Pipilotti Rist, a Swiss artist whose video Pamela (1997) is a mesmerizing take on a day in the life of a flight attendant; Canadian Rodney Graham, whom we watch sleep in the back of a van as it drives through the city streets of Vancouver in Halcion Sleep (1994); New Yorker Seoungho Cho, a native of South Korea whose work, Identical Time (1997), presents images of a blighted subway journey to reflect upon urban isolation and dislocation; Philadelphia's Peter Rose, who explores subterranean rituals that celebrate the solstices and equinoxes of the sun in Understory (1997); Helen Mirra, a resident of Chicago, excerpts Jean Vigo's 1934 film L'Atalante in Third (1998), a spellbinding video in which time seems suspended; British artist Abigail Lane whose work Never Never Mind lyrically blends sound and image to capture a few pigeons in a seemingly "neurotic" moment; and American Bill Viola, who created The Passing (1991) as a personal response to birth and death in the family.

Trance has been organized by Kathleen Forde of the Department of 20th-Century Art.