NEW YORK, NY.- 303 Gallery will present their eleventh solo exhibition dedicated to the work of Canadian conceptualist Rodney Graham (1949-2022), and the gallery’s first presentation of the artist’s output since his passing. Graham rose to prominence in the 1970s, considered part of the so-called “Vancouver School”for his conceptual approach to lens-based media, alongside peers Jeff Wall and Stan Douglas. Graham became well known for starring in his absurdist films and lightbox photographs, portraying himself as various archetypes in fictitious scenes often involving elaborately detailed sets and props. His practice came to encompass nearly every creative medium: photography, film, painting, sculpture, performance, writing, and music, which befit his equally wide ranging interests in the realms of art, Hollywood film, music, history, and psychology. The works on view span the last twenty-five years of his career and emphasize Graham’s virtuosity, from his early looping film Vexation Island, which was exhibited in the Canadian Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale, to several of his signature photographic light boxes, and the series of sculptures and paintings that emerged out of his fictional selves.

His 1997 film Vexation Island centers on a castaway in 18th century dress (a swashbuckling Graham) trapped in an absurd sisyphean loop. For much of the film, Graham’s character slumbers beneath a palm tree, until at last he briefly awakens and sets off a farcical chain reaction, rendering him unconscious once more. Shot in Cinemascope format with super-saturated color, the gloss and glamor of the film’s production only makes its lack of a further plot even more absurd. Trapped in an endless cycle of rising and falling, awareness and oblivion, Graham’s self-described “costume-picture, that is to say, a travesty" gestures to the inherent absurdity of the human condition.

Rodney Graham began making photographic lightboxes in 2000, drawn to the medium’s dry, scientific qualities. Media Studies ‘77 (2016) centers on Graham in the role of academic, mid-lecture with a lit cigarette in hand. He confidently addresses the viewer as his student body, but with the blank screen beside him and a wiped down blackboard, his pedagogy isn’t tied to a particular subject; he could be discussing film classics, or analyzing Graham’s own output. In another diptych lightbox from 2013, Pipe Cleaner Artist, Amalfi, ‘61, Graham casts himself as a relaxed, tinkering sculptor from a bygone era, at work in a picturesque coastal studio. Through this invented persona, Graham romanticizes the artist’s studio as a utopian site of inspiration. Inspired by a 1930s Man Ray photograph of Jean Cocteau, his pipe cleaner artist appears removed from the outside world, immersed in his practice with a calm focus.

Like a method actor staying in character off stage, Graham occasionally took up the invented practices of his characters, producing distinct new bodies of work. These works exemplify both the degree of detail that went into the worldbuilding of his lightboxes as well as his skill beyond lens-based media, as a painter and sculptor in his own right. On view are several of his Pipe Cleaner Artist Studio Constructions, (2014-2015), works made in the style of his Pipe Cleaner Artist and realized after photographing the self-portrait. Made from layered mixed media cloaked in white acrylic and gesso, the works reference Cubist constructions, collaging together different elements, and blur the bounds of Graham’s performance. A series of oil and sand on canvas paintings, which evolved out of prop making for a monumental lightbox photograph titled Vacuuming the Gallery, 1949, (2020) further demonstrates Graham’s ability to quote his own work as a generative action. Inspired by a single Alexander Rodchenko watercolor, Abstract Composition (1941), Graham began a series of abstract paintings that continued until 2022 and are among his last works. Tempering spontaneity with careful planning, Graham developed a systematic approach to mapping out each of his compositions, meticulously adjusting the scale and placement of different elements to suggest restlessness, as if they are never settled in one configuration for too long. The intricate interplay of faux-finishes and delicately textured planes in each painting recall the various materials and veneers which appear throughout his lightbox scenes. Perhaps initiated through a persona, the paintings endure as distinctly Graham.