Lost in the moment: the Rodney Graham retrospective offers three decades of work in several mediums, but it's the films and videos that fully convey this Canadian artist's finesse, eccentricity and abiding good humor

Art in America, March, 2005 by Christopher Miles

"Rodney Graham: A Little Thought," a major traveling exhibition, samples the Vancouver-based artist's music, text-based works, and photographic and optical pieces. The show's focus, however, is firmly on Graham's film and video art. Though a couple of key works are missing, the exhibition presents a dozen of the artist's essential film and video pieces on monitors, in screening rooms and in spaces designed by Graham. Two of the works incorporate appropriated footage; four are short but elaborate films that might be categorized as genre pieces or character studies in which Graham is the star; three eschew character and plot to examine staged actions and issues of presentation; and two are performance documents with Graham featured as himself. In each of these categories are earlier and later efforts. Add to this a music video, and one sees Graham as an artist who works on multiple tracks rather than in sequential phases. His works share a preoccupation with small, isolated moments, sometimes quiet, sometimes intense, that contain odd behaviors, curious activities and strange events, and all of them position the viewer between the clarity of what is seen and the elusive nature of what can be understood.

Born in 1949 in Abbotsford, B.C., Graham enrolled at the University of British Columbia in 1968. Initially pursuing a literature major, he was lured into more visual terrain by the art-history courses taught by the photographer and Conceptual artist Ian Wallace, who frequently lectured on Minimalist and Post-Minimalist art. Though he left UBC in 1973 before completing his bachelor's degree, Graham gained much from his time there, immersing himself in literature, poststructuralist theory and psychology, and developing a creative network that included "Vancouver School" artists Jeff Wall and David Wisdom. His first film project was to have been a Hitchcock-inspired collaboration with Wall and Wallace, for which the three artists received Canada Council funding. The film was never finished.

Graham credits Conceptual art for the paradigm that allowed him to become a visual artist, for permitting a practice incorporating textual and theoretical elements, open to new media, and centered on the development and execution of an idea rather than on the physical act of making. To this, Graham brought his own quirky interests, as he used photography and drawing to document subject matter that was common to the point of cliche: fashion models, nature shots, Roman ruins. A key work from this period (not in the show) is 75 Polaroids (1976), for which Graham made 75 nighttime shots in a Vancouver wood with illumination from a flashlight. The piece laid the groundwork for what the artist calls "lighting events" and launched his enduring interest in optics and the theme of man in nature.

For a period in the later '70s, Graham immersed himself in music. With Wall and artist Frank Johnston, he founded UJ3RK5 ("you jerks"), a new-wave band that came out of jam sessions in the art studios at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University, where Wall was teaching. (Graham also enrolled at SFU, studying briefly with Wall.) Through various incarnations that included Wall, Wallace, Wisdom and other artists and musicians, UJ3RK5 achieved cult status in the Canadian music scene before dissolving in 1980. Though Graham's involvement with music has been sporadic, when engaged, he is serious. After a long hiatus from playing, Graham returned in the mid-'90s and has since recorded several solo and collaborative albums that broadly explore musical styles.

While still at SFU, Graham produced his first "lighting event," Illuminated Ravine (1979). Visitors traveled a path through a forest to a ravine, where, for two hours per night for three nights, diesel-powered lighting units like those used in logging camps would bathe the natural setting in harsh, artificial illumination. Lights flickered with power fluctuations, as the diesel noise drowned out all other sounds and potential conversation.

The way in which Illuminated Ravine simultaneously facilitated and skewed the experience of nature was echoed in Camera Obscura (1979), an outdoor structure whose darkened interior offered a soft-focus,

upside-down, real-time, pinhole-projected image of the tree standing directly outside. (A scale model and photographs in the exhibition document the destroyed work.) This was the beginning of a series of camera obscura projects and large photographs of upside-down trees (seven of which are in the current show) that would earn acclaim for Graham through the 1980s and into the '90s.

Illuminated Ravine also became the basis for Graham's first completed film project, Two Generators (1984), which presents viewers with a river at night, similarly treated to harsh light and deafening noise. Meant to be screened, Two Generators is displayed in the exhibition only as film in a can.

Not until the '90s did Graham wholly devote himself to video and film. While varied in other ways, his practice consistently relies on the simple device of repetition. Graham, who commented in a 2002 interview that his approach involves an attempt to "ensnare" the viewer, typically works with looped segments of a few minutes, short enough so the viewer is almost certain to catch the repeat. The earliest film/video piece in the current survey is also Graham's first looped work, and his first using appropriated footage. Dr. No (1991-94) takes its title, inspiration and footage from the 1962 James Bond flick.