Exhibition Review: Rodney Graham | Getting it Together in the Country
Betula Pendula Fastigiata (Sous-Chef on Smoke Break) 2011
Painted aluminum lightbox with transmounted chromogenic transparency
© Rodney Graham
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Written by Luxi H.
Copyedited by Robyn Hager
From 28 January to 8 May, Getting It Together in the Country, a show by Rodney Graham will be on view in Hauser & Wirth Somerset. The exhibition will have the major later works by Graham, and it signals the culmination of the Canadian artist’s career that spanned over five decades and ceased only months before the show officially opened up. Rodney Graham was a polymath, an artist, a painter, a writer, a poet, and a music engineer. His work is nurtured by an abundance of cultural memory and explores the depth of cultural symbols through constant self-reinvention.
Smoke Break 2 (Drywaller) 2012
Painted aluminium lightboxes with transmounted chromogenic transparencies; diptych
© Rodney Graham
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
What will be the main body of the exhibition is the signature lightbox series,“The Four Seasons” that stages the mise-en-scène of the artist’s fictional presence against the background of different seasons. Rodney Graham first finished the creation of Sous-Chef on Smoke Break and Drywaller, also called Smoke Break 2, the two works that stand for summer and winter. The self-played chef and drywaller are seen taking a repose from their daily routine, fully self-absorbed. Against the intensity of this tranquil moment, the seasons unfold behind and around him, bearing cultural symbols that are popular and kitsch, a suggestion of Graham’s humorous, ironic presence.
Main Street Tree 2006
Chromogenic photograph
© Rodney Graham
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Irony and theatricality have also been the undertone of the collage he created later on. After summer and winter, Graham further added to the series a spring diptych in which he put on the costume of an 18th century French aristocrat and operated a camera set emblematically of the 1950s Hollywood scene. At the background, a line of cherry trees blossoms with their pink artificiality, and along with the dramatic greenery, it pushes the saturation of the photo to an evocative level that challenges the visual tradition.
Actor / Director, 1954 2013
Painted aluminium lightboxes with transmounted chromogenic transparencies; diptych
© Rodney Graham
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Music has played a significant role in Graham’s photographic career: it becomes a visual reference in his images, and more importantly, music has provided stylistic inspirations for Graham’s photographic work. His playfulness and his irony, his evocative and subversive challenge, all find their expression both in his music and in his photographs. The images for spring, summer, and winter visualize sophisticatedly the fury and rebellion as sounded in Rock & Roll, and beneath them flows a jazz undertone of self-mockery.
Rotating Stand (Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, Orange) 2015
Steel, aluminum, wood, acrylic paint on canvas
Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zürich
© Rodney Graham
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Autumn is not the final season of a year, but in Graham’s cycle, it has the heaviest, most solemn tranquility. In the autumn triptych, Rodney Graham is staged as a paddler approaching the mouth of the Seymour River in Vancouver, his hometown. Above him the overarching iron bridge stands in its permanent structure, silently rusting away. A strong green and blue tint serves as the undertone for the photo, giving the air of an expired film. The playfulness and sharp irony noticeable from previous images have quieted down in the autumn triptych. A quietness sedates the visual nerves.
Paddler, Mouth of the Seymour 2012 – 2013
Painted aluminum lightboxes with transmounted chromogenic transparencies; triptych
© Rodney Graham
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
“The Four Seasons” was created as a fictional self-portrait series, and Rodney Graham’s practice naturally reminds us of the late renaissance artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo and his portraitures which also used cultural symbols and incorporated the frame of four seasons. Along this line of tradition, like the predecessors before him, Rodney Graham’s later works synchronize the self’s inner time with a wider, seasonal cycle; and in so doing, the artist has managed to picture an intertextuality between the self, the nature, and the wild sea of cultural symbols.
