One of Canada's most humorous conceptual artists--as witty as he is smart--Rodney Graham gets his first North American museum retrospective and accompanying catalogue. Rodney Graham: A Little Thought tracks the career of a brilliant, idiosyncratic artist whose work spans a range of media including photography, film, book works, installation and pop music. In this volume, amply illustrated with many never-before-seen images from early in his career as well as new photography of his most recent works, scholarly essays provide a broad context for viewing: Cornelia Butler looks at Graham's relationship to landscape and Canadian identity, Lynne Cooke examines the construction of the artist's persona in works such as City Self/ Country Self (2001), and Shep Steiner discusses the joke as a conceptual strategy for Graham. Diedrich Diederichsen considers the artist's oeuvre within the context of musical structure, and Sara Krajewski describes how Graham's video works unfold. Finally, Grant Arnold offers an in-depth illustrated chronology, tracing the range of activities that have occupied Graham since his early days on the Vancouver scene.

Rodney Graham: A Little Thought

Arts & Photography

Butler, Connie

Diederichsen, Diedrich

Cooke, Lynne

Arnold, Grant

Bradley, Jessica

Steiner, Shepherd

Krajewski, Sara

Individual Artists

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Scott McFarland makes photographs that address the relationship between nature, civilization and representation through the depiction of rustic cabins, manicured landscapes, zoos, obsolescent photo-labs and the pastoral fringe of urban spaces. Drawing upon the histories of landscape painting and photography, his images are created digitally; each work is comprised of a number of exposures that are stitched into a seamless picture. The constructed character of McFarland's work becomes visible in anomalies-out-of-season foliage or inconsistent shadows-that emerge during extended viewing and undermine the traditional attachment of the photograph to a specific moment. On one level the photographs indicate a state of harmony and tranquility, while on the other the overall effect appears artificial. McFarland's work emphasizes the precarious balance between human and natural worlds, and furthermore how photography's link to reality is both true and fabricated.

Scott McFarland

Barnes, Martin

Respini, Eva

Honoré, Vincent

Photography & Video

Douglas&McIntyre

Over the past twenty-five years, Vancouver-based artist Ken Lum has developed a large and compelling body of work that includes painting, sculpture, performance and photography. From exuberant paintings of nonsensical language to arrangements of furniture that deliberately block their conventional use; from shopkeeper signs that combine the language of commercial identity with personal messages to mazes that incorporate mirrors and poetic texts, Lum's multi-faceted work is consistent in its exploration of the tension between individual identity and the unrelenting processes of acculturation that pervade contemporary urban life. Since the early 1980s, Lum has regularly been represented in exhibitions throughout North America, Europe and Asia, including such prestigious shows as Documenta, the Shanghai Biennale and, most recently, the Istanbul Biennal. This richly illustrated volume, which contains insightful essays by celebrated critics and curator Grant Arnold, accompanies a large-scale exhibition organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery that celebrates Lum's entire career and showcases important aspects of his work that have never been seen before in North America. Clearly written and sumptuously designed, Ken Lum showcases the intelligent, provocative and passionate work of one of Canada's foremost artists, recent winner of the Hnatyshyn Visual Arts Award for outstanding achievement by a Canadian artist.

Ken Lum

ENWEZOR, Okwui

Schoeny, Roland

Throughout the history of the Vancouver Art Gallery, gifts from private art collectors have played a vital role in building and expanding the institution's collection, providing economic support for artists and encouraging discussions of history and culture within the community. The gallery has regularly recognized the quality of these private collections and acknowledged the dedication of their owners with such exhibitions as Real Pictures: Photographs from the Collection of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft (2005); Determined Pursuit: Highlights from the Longstaffe Collection (2004); Vancouver Collects (2001). Continuing in that tradition is Shore, Forest and Beyond, an exhibition of 100 works gathered from the collection assembled by Michael Audain over the past two decades. While his focus has been largely on representations of British Columbia's geography and culture-together with the works of British Columbia-based artists-from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, another facet of the collection focusses on Mexican modernism through the works of Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo, among others. Arranged thematically, the exhibition and this accompanying publication address the breadth of the collection as well as Audain's donations to the Vancouver Art Gallery's holdings. Among the highlights of their Northwest Coast holdings are mid-nineteenth-century masks by Haida, Nuxalk, Salish, Tlingit and Tsimshian carvers as well as contemporary works by such First Nations artists as Robert Davidson, Reg Davidson, Beau Dick, Richard Hunt, Brian Jungen, Marianne Nicolson and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. Other notable aspects of the British Columbia collection include paintings by Emily Carr, B.C. Binning and E.J. Hughes together with contemporary works by Roy Arden, Gathie Falk, Rodney Graham, Angela Grossman, Ken Lum, Takao Tanabe and Etienne Zack. Taken together, these artworks speak evocatively to diverse conceptions of place and acknowledge the importance of Audain and his partner, Yoshiko Kurasawa, as patrons who have contributed significantly to the development of Canada's West Coast as an important centre of contemporary culture. This book accompanies a show at the Vancouver Art Gallery from October 29, 2011 to January 29, 2012.

Shore, Forest and Beyond: Art from the Audain Collection

Thom, Ian M.

History & Criticism

Known for her expansive multidisciplinary approach to art making Vancouver-based Dana Claxton, who is Hunkpapa Lakota (Sioux), has investigated notions of Indigenous identity, beauty, gender and the body, as well as broader social and political issues through a practice which encompasses photography, film, video and performance. Rooted in contemporary art strategies, her practice critiques the representations of Indigenous people that circulate in art, literature and popular culture in general. In doing so, Claxton regularly combines Lakota traditions with “Western” influences, using a powerful and emotive “mix, meld and mash” approach to address the oppressive legacies of colonialism and to articulate Indigenous world views, histories and spirituality. This timely catalogue will be the first monograph to examine the full breadth and scope of Claxton’s practice. It will be extensively illustrated and will include essays by Claxton’s colleague Jaleh Mansoor, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art &amp; Theory at the University of British Columbia; Monika Kin Gagnon, Professor in the Communications Department at Concordia University, who has followed Claxton’s work for 25 years; Olivia Michiko Gagnon, a New York–based scholar and doctoral student in Performance Studies; and Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Dana Claxton: Fringing the Cube

Gagnon, Monika Kin

Gagnon, Olivia Michiko

Mansoor, Jaleh

Figure 1 Publishing

A stalwart of Vancouver's Conceptual scene, artist and musician Rodney Graham has used an array of media to explore appropriated historical sources from literature, philosophy and pop music, and to induce shifts in the viewer's preconceptions and perceptions of these sources: Sigmund Freud, Donald Judd, Edgar Allan Poe and even Graham's former bandmate Jeff Wall have provided subject matter for the artist's critical tweakings. Through the Forest collects over 100 works, dating from 1978 to the present, that emphasize Graham's interpolations in cultural history-in the forms of appendices, bookmarks and exhibition devices in the style of Donald Judd. This monograph also premiers Graham's first incursion into painting, his 2005 series Picasso, My Master, which inflects the reverence commonly attending Picasso's work with his signature humor. Through the Forest makes a thorough assessment of Graham's influential and seductive body of work.

Rodney Graham: Through the Forest

Heynen, Julian

Dean, Tacita

Hatje Cantz

Over the past three decades, Mark Ruwedel (born 1954) has examined the intersections of representation, cultural memory and shifting perceptions of space. His work is an epic account of North American civilization, extending from topologies of urban architecture to large-scale projects such as The Ice Age and Westward the Course of Empire. Ruwedel represents landscape as a site where radically different scales of time intertwine. Picturing the earth as an enormous historical archive, he describes his work as "an inquiry into the histories, cultural and natural, of places that reveal the land as both a field of human endeavor and an agent of historical processes." Ruwedel spotlights traces of human activity―whether an ancient footpath in Death Valley or a rotting wooden trestle abandoned after the failure of the Vancouver, Victoria and Eastern Railroad―in relation to geographic and geological upheavals that have shaped the earth's surface.

Mark Ruwedel

Steidl/Scotiabank

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