Artist, musician. Rodney Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia in 1949. He studied at the University of British Columbia from 1968 to 1971 but did not receive a degree. Associated with a group of Vancouver artists such as Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Ken Lum and others, Graham works in a variety of media, including film, music, text works, and sculpture. Some themes that reoccur in Graham’s work include an interrogation of means of representation, a preoccupation with Freudian psychoanalytic theory, and systems falling into entropy. Often these themes are explored through a strategy he calls “annexation,†annexing his art works to other works as opposed to appropriating from them. For example, in Lenz (1983), Graham had an unfinished novel by Georg Büchner reprinted with an introduction featuring a repetitive loop in the text.
Graham’s work has been featured in exhibitions at Galerie Hauser + Wirth (Zurich), Whitechapel Gallery, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kunstverein Munchen, the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Venice Biennale, The Renaissance Society, the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, and the Institute of Contemporary Art (London). In addition to visual art, Graham has released ten albums of music, and was a member of the post-punk band, UJ3RK5, along with Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall, Kitty Byrne, Colin Griffiths, Danice McLeod, Frank Ramirez, and David Wisdom. Graham lives and works in Vancouver.
Additional information and materials about Rodney Graham are available on request in Art, Architecture and Planning at the University of British Columbia Library. http://www.library.ubc.ca/finearts/
Discrete project sites documenting the work of specific artists and collectives in detail.
Essays and conversation providing a context for exploring the Project Sites and Archives.
Video interviews conducted between December 2008 and May 2009 reflecting on Vancouver’s art scene in the sixties.