This work is in keeping with the artist's interest in the history of technology, but unlike the face-off of the unrelated, obsolescent 1930s typewriter and 1950s film projector in Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 (2003), it addresses a causal relationship between emergent machinery and outmoded human labor, giving socioeconomic weight to a deceptively quaint image.Īnother series touches upon the careers of Alphonse de Neuville and Ernest Meisonnier, two French painters noted for their service in, and subsequent paintings of, the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). ![]() Graham's protagonist instead continues his work on a miniature-scale: a model of Minot's Ledge lighthouse sits on a table just behind the lounging hobbyist, who inspects an illustration from a book of lighthouses that also happens to be the inspiration for the scene. The lightbox Lighthouse Keeper with Lighthouse Model, 1955 (2010) depicts the lighthouse keeper in his maritime kitchen, at a time when automation was rendering his job redundant. "Painter, Poet, Lighthouse Keeper," the title of Graham's current exhibition at Lisson Gallery, introduces several new characters whose creative lives are deeply marked by history. But if the trickster artist's practice explores the innumerable ways that cultural history can be reframed, then any complaints about his ubiquity falter at the possibility that, like the mise-en-abîme of a wanted poster in Paradoxical Western Scene (2006), one frame merely invites another. Such densely layered work can make for stimulating (if maddening) viewing, much as Graham's repeat billing can tilt from artistic reflexivity to self-infatuation. ![]() Cowboys, pirates, saloon men, and Sunday painters, these pseudo-egos follow the performative loops of their respective genres in films and lightboxes that Graham-the consummate citationist-appends with still other pop-cultural and esoteric references. ![]() Since first stepping onto the other side of the lens in the mid-90s, Rodney Graham has fashioned himself as all color of amateur and outlaw in a wry game of wish fulfillment for an artist of inescapable renown.
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