Rodney Graham – Lightboxes - Hardcover

Graham, Rodney

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3868288023 ISBN 13: 9783868288025

Publisher: Kehrer Verlag, 2017

Synopsis

Hardly any other contemporary artist has devoted himself to searching for traces left behind by different ways of life in the 19th and 20th centuries as the Canadian Rodney Graham (b. 1949). Since the 1970s, he has been working on a rhizome-like, conceptual oeuvre that has never shied away from new jumps in time or genre. His work combines film, photography, installation, performance, painting, literature, and music. Graham, who, along with artists such as Jeff Wall or Stan Douglas, belongs to the »Vancouver School«, appropriates styles, trends, and discourses from the era of romanticism through to post-modernity, commenting or expanding on them or rethinking them with an understated irony. This book, designed in close co-operation with the artist, accompanies the exhibition at Museum Frieder Burda. It presents Graham’s 36 photo light boxes from 2000 to the present, among them key works like the Newspaper Man. The central focus is on the manifold ways in which Graham has staged himself. He always gives the impression of a melancholy time traveler, a modern-day Buster Keaton, negotiating the trials and tribulations of modern culture in various guises and in doing so, slipping into the role of producer, observer or mediator.

About this title

About the Author

Rodney Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada in 1949. He graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1971 and lives and works in Vancouver. Solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona; Kunstmuseum, Basel; Hamburger Kunsthalle; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Sprengel Museum, Hannover (where he was the recipient of the Kurt Schwitters Prize), and the BAWAG Foundation in Vienna, Austria. He has been included in recent group exhibitions at La Maison Rouge, Paris; Vancouver Art Gallery; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Avid Reader, 2011

The idea for this large triptych came from

a scene I witnessed on Main Street in

Vancouver: An artist acquaintance of mine

reading some old newspapers that had

been put up in the window of a shop that

was either closing or preparing to open―in

any case to prevent the inside of the shop

from being seen. I imagined the idea of an

avid reader, lets say a compulsive reader

even, who reads everything he encounters

on the street in sequence. I wanted as

well to make an image of two pasts, the

more distant past of history and the “just

past” so, having found a collection of

newspapers (The Vancouver Sun one of the

city’s two main dailies) from 1945―just

after the end of the Second World War,

and having found a man’s suit in my size

from the year of my birth, 1949 (dated by

the tailor), I decided to set the piece in

Vancouver in 1949 and have it document

the protagonist’s (as the actor, my own)

encounter with recent history. The building

is a Woolworths, the five-and-dime chain

ubiquitous in both North America and

Britain, and its windows have been covered

over (it is either closing or reopening)

with the already four-year-old Vancouver

newspapers. The avid reader, who has been

reading, as one does, from left to right,

has just turned the corner into the shop’s

glassed vestibule.

– Rodney Graham

Edition details

• Publisher: Kehrer Verlag
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 3868288023
• ISBN 13: 9783868288025
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 130
• Editor: Frieder Burda Museum