Rodney Graham
| Rodney Graham OC |
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|---|---|
park's public art – "Aerodynamic Forms in Space" by Rodney Graham
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| Born |
William Rodney Graham January 16, 1949 Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Education | University of British Columbia, Vancouver |
| Known for | Film, video art, photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation art |
| Notable work | Vexation Island (1997) |
| Movement | Vancouver School |
Rodney Graham OC (born January 16, 1949) is an artist and musician born in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He is most often associated with the Vancouver School. He 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.
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 in the band UJ3RK5 with fellow artist Jeff Wall. His wide-ranging and often unclassifiable work has frequently engaged with technologies of the past: literary, psychological and musical texts, optical devices, and film as historical medium.
Among his earliest works is Camera Obscura (1979; destroyed 1981) 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 (with Rome Ruins [1978]) 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* (1991), Lenz (1983) and Reading Machine for Lenz (1993), respectively; many of these were carried out with the esteemed Belgian publisher Yves Gevaert and/or the gallerist Christine Burgin. His extensive body of works related to Sigmund Freud (beginning in 1983) in a sense develops out of this text-based practice, though later found books would be integrated unmodified into Donald Judd-like "specific objects," as with The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (1987).
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