Rodney Graham's prop paintings keep viewers guessing

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      Rodney Graham: Props and Other Paintings
      At the Charles H. Scott Gallery until November 16
      Rodney Graham: Collected Works
      At the Rennie Collection at Wing Sang until October 4

      Rodney Graham’s playful and ingenious practice spans photography, video, film, sculpture, performance, installation, music, and, in recent years, painting. His cultural, historical, and psychoanalytical references have ranged from Sigmund Freud to Donald Judd, and from Richard Wagner to Alfred Hitchcock. He’s also examined the tropes of modernist art, posing notions of amateurism and failure against those of mastery and success.

      The challenge for the viewer is to figure out which is what­—and why.

      Based in Vancouver and internationally acclaimed, Graham is the frequent actor in his films, videos, and backlit photos. In interviews, he has joked that he is the producer and star of his own movies. He is also, it seems, the script writer and set decorator.

      In many instances, he creates detailed back stories for the characters he portrays. He also produces the paintings and assemblages that appear as props in his media-based works—and that serve as his method-acting way of inhabiting his visual fictions.

      In his show at the Charles H. Scott Gallery, his backgrounding objects have been promoted to the foreground.

      Props and Other Paintings is the last of a trio of overlapping Rodney Graham exhibitions initiated by the folks at the Rennie Collection. Many of the Scott Gallery works are loans from the Rennie, and most of them make more sense when seen in the context of the photos, videos, and installations on view there.

      Graham’s explanations for the objects in Props and Other Paintings are posted near the entrance to the Scott Gallery. Some of his works—such as Black Tapestry, 24 copies of the cover of a Carole King LP overpainted in black ink—are independent conceptual projects.

      Others are directly or indirectly related to his media art. For instance, he reveals that the big, inverted drip painting hanging on the Scott’s east wall is a kind of epilogue to the backlit photographic triptych The Gifted Amateur, Nov. 10th, 1962 on view at the Rennie. Shot in 2007 on an obsessively constructed set, the photo features Graham as a well-off guy in his late 50s, living in a West Coast modernist “bachelor pad”, nonchalantly making a Morris Louis–inspired abstraction. He is wearing Hugh Hefner–esque pajamas, a cigarette hangs from his mouth, and the living room where he pours paint onto canvas is filled with art books, mid-century modernist furniture, and objets d’art.

      Blaine Campbell

      The big abstraction installed at the Scott Gallery, however, is not the same as the one featured in the photograph at the Rennie. As seems to be Graham’s habit, it was one of a group of such paintings he created (and continues to create) after the photo was completed—and this is where things get complicated. Within the context of the photograph, the mock Morris Louis painting (along with the fake Richard Neutra living room) reads as an amusing deconstruction of the 1960s, of both late modernism and late middle age and their parallel aspirations to a condition of consequence. As a work created outside that context—an actual painting hanging on a gallery wall rather than a prop for a photographic tableau—it seems to signify Graham’s own awkward attempt to master a historical art form. Or does it? Is it Graham or his amateur alter ego who produced the work on view at the Scott Gallery?

      A similar conundrum—good prop or bad painting?—is posed at the Scott Gallery by the five oils from My Late Early Styles; Part 1: The Middle Period, which Graham describes as “derivative École de Paris–style easel paintings made to fit some frames fabricated in the ’30s and ’40s by a Parisian frame-maker”. Graham’s “derivative” paintings were originally produced for exhibition at the Lisson Gallery in London in 2007, featured in an ad for that show, and then refeatured in an art work based on the ad. “In this way,” Graham tell us, “the paintings, which were just paintings, became prop paintings.”

      At the Rennie Collection, 42 such works make up a truly impressive installation, mounted in over-the-top salon style, floor to ceiling on a towering wall. The effect of the installation at the Rennie is wonderfully absurd; the cluster of five mucky paintings at the Scott, merely puzzling. Again, we’re left to wonder: are the paintings a sincere exploration of the tropes of modernism or a satirical undermining of them?

      Blaine Campbell

      One of the funniest works in the Rennie show is the black-and-white video, shot on Super 16 film, titled Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong. (It was inspired, Graham says, by an anecdote about Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason.) At the Scott Gallery, a big graphite drawing, Gong 3, and an accompanying painting, Fermentation Tanks 1, attest to the mediocrity of the fictional Fluxus artist, played by Graham, who, yes, lobs potatoes at a gong in the performance video at the Rennie.

      Again, the drawing and painting do not appear in the video: they were created as part of the character’s back story. Again, good method acting, bad abstract art. Mastery, it seems, is a vexed and mysterious business.

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