For half a century, Rodney Graham meticulously weaved together the strands of cultural and intellectual history through the mediums of photography, film, music, performance, and painting. With a keen eye for wordplay and a penchant for allusions to literature and philosophy – be it the works of Lewis Carroll, Sigmund Freud, or Kurt Cobain – Graham spun cyclical stories that were peppered with his sardonic sense of humor, a nod to his roots in Vancouver’s post-punk scene of the late 1970s. In his nine-minute long piece, Vexation Island (1997), the artist assumes the role of a 17th-century sailor, discovered unconscious under a coconut tree with a visible bruise on his head. After eight and a half minutes, he awakens and shakes the tree, causing a coconut to fall and render him unconscious once again, triggering the repetition of the sequence. Graham reappears as a cowboy in How I Became a Ramblin’ Man (1999) and as both a city dandy and a country bumpkin in City Self/Country Self (2001) – fictitious characters perpetually trapped in an unending loop of actions. Drawing from his previous series of photographs featuring inverted oak trees, Graham’s fascination with dreamlike states and the ramblings of the unconscious are evident. As he puts it, “Inversion has a logic: you do not have to dig deep into modern physics to understand that the scientific perspective insists that the world is not truly what it seems. The eye sees a tree upside down before the brain rights it, just like how it appears to the glass back of my large format field camera.”
www.ftn-books.com has several scarce Graham publications available. Among them the 1989 van Abbemuseum catalog designed by Arlette Brouwers.
