WHISTLER, BC.- Phantom Scripts revisits three works by Geoffrey Farmer from the Audain Art Museums Permanent Collection Las Crónicas del Vampiro, 22 de noviembre de 1973 (2010 2025), La Política de las Apariciones (2012 2025), The Good Sweeper (2017 2025) reframing them through newly composed scripts, annotations, and didactic texts authored by the artist. The texts function as interjections speculative, contextual, poetic that re-examine and complicate the earlier works. In doing so, Farmer explores how art can be returned to, re-read, and re-situated under shifting historical and ethical awarenesses.
This exhibition is a return not only to Farmers past works, but to the evolving conditions in which they are understood. Phantom Scripts highlights the artists curiosity to revisit the assumptions, forms, and the silences embedded in his earlier productions, treating the past not as fixed, but as an unsettled field of interpretation and implication. Early aesthetic elements remain vivid, disorienting, alive but are now considered by the artist within a broader awareness of colonial entanglements and queer disidentification, foregrounding the role of the museum not as neutral host, but as a site of complicity, memory, and potential transformation.
Geoffrey Farmer (b. 1967, Vancouver, Canada) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans sculpture, performance, installation, and text. Over the past three decades, he has developed a materially and conceptually expansive practice grounded in fragmentation, transformation, and reassembly. Drawing from archival sources, cultural histories, and personal memory, his projects often unfold over time and resist fixed interpretation.
Farmer represented Canada at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and has shown work at institutions including Schinkel Pavilion (Berlin), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), and the Louvre Museum. His work is part of several public collections, including those of Tate, MoMA (NY), the AGO, the National Gallery of Canada and the Audain Art Museum.
He currently lives on Kauai, Hawaii, where he completed agricultural training and is developing Community Flowers, a nonprofit flower farm. He also received a State of Hawaii microgrant to support local food production and address food security on the island.
Geoffrey Farmer: Phantom Scripts is curated by Cassidy Luteijn, Assistant Curator, Audain Art Museum, Whistler, BC.