Coming out of Vancouver's 1970s photoconceptual tradition, Rodney Graham's work is often informed by historical literary, musical, philosophical and popular references. He is most often associated with other West-coast Canadian artists, including Vikky Alexander, Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, Roy Arden and Ken Lum. He was taught by fellow Vancouver school artist Ian Wallace while at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, from 1979 to 1980. Around this time, he played electric guitar in the band UJ3RK5 with fellow artist Jeff Wall on keyboards and Ian Wallace on electric bass, among others. His wide-ranging and often genre-busting work has frequently engaged with technologies of the past: literary, psychological and musical texts, optical devices, and film as an historical medium. Among his earliest works is Camera Obscura a site-specific work that consisted of a shed-sized optical device on his family's farm field near Abbotsford, British Columbia. Entering the shed, the observer was confronted with an inverted image of a solitary tree. Both prior to this and throughout the 1980s and 90s, Graham employed the technique of the camera obscura in his work. Beginning in the early 1980s, Graham took found texts as the basis for his bookworks—at once conceptual and material—inserting bookmarks with additional pages, inserting textual loops or incorporating books into optical devices in works such as Dr. No*, Lenz and Reading Machine for Lenz respectively. Many of these were carried out with esteemed Belgian publisher Yves Gevaert and/or the gallerist Christine Burgin. His extensive body of work related to Sigmund Freud has developed out of this text-based practice, though, later, found object books would be integrated unmodified into Donald Judd-like sculptures, for example The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. Until 1997, when he represented Canada at the Venice Biennale with the film loop Vexation Island, Graham was most well known for his series of photographs of Welsh oaks seen upside-down. For this project, he employed a photographer to take black and white negatives of majestic, isolated trees in the English countryside with a large-format camera. He then hung the pictures upside down, like camera obscura images. In 1998 Graham produced his definitive work on this theme, a series of seven monumental images of Welsh oaks printed on color paper to produce warm deep sepia and charcoal hues. A postage stamp depicting Graham's photograph, Basement Camera Shop circa 1937 was issued on March 22, 2013 by Canada Post as part of their Canadian Photography series. The image is a recreation of a snapshot discovered by the artist at an antique store. Graham places himself in the photograph as the owner standing at the counter, waiting for a customer.
Film
In 1994, Graham began a series of films and videos in which he himself appears as the principal character: Halcion Sleep, Vexation Island , How I Became a Ramblin' Man, and The Phonokinetoscope. In The Phonokinetoscope Graham's engagement with the origins of cinema and its eventual demise surface. In this work, Graham takes up a prototype by Thomas Edison and puts forward an argument for the relation between sound and image in film. In Vexation Island, a shipwrecked sailor, played by Graham, wakes up on a tropical island only to be knocked unconscious by a falling coconut that he has succeeded in shaking out of a palm tree; after a while he reawakens, returns to the tree and the cycle repeats. Later, in Rheinmetall/Victoria 8, two increasingly obsolete technologies, the typewriter and film projector, face off against one another—with the latter projecting a film of the former. The film Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong , shot on 16mm and presented as a looped projection, fictitiously documents a 1969 performance strongly reminiscent of the Fluxus movement. The artist, played by Graham, is shown sitting on a chair in the setting of an alternative cultural institution, with an audience watching him trying to hit a gong with potatoes. All the potatoes that actually hit the gong were subsequently used to produce vodka in a small still. The bottle is displayed in a showcase, both an end product and part of the work. As in many of Graham's films, the relatively simple plot is in stark contrast to the effort that went into the production, with the artist conducting extensive research and hiring a professional film crew.
Drawing and painting
In 2003, Graham turned to drawing and painting for the first time. Adopting a persona in a host of related photographic, installation and painted works, The Gifted Amateur, November 10, 1962, 2007, indicates both continuing performative and art historical directions in his work. In 2009, Graham exhibited a series of film installations with Harun Farocki, called "HF/RG," at the Jeu de Paume, Paris.
Graham lives in Vancouver and is married to the artist Shannon Oksanen. Though they have not divorced, she lives separately with her two children and their father. Together they own Liberty Bakery in Vancouver.
