This film presentation is part of the Momentum series, a touring project from the Collection of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
Rodney Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia and is one of Canada’s leading visual artists, internationally recognized for his rigorously intellectual art practice ranging from photography, film, video and music to sculpture, painting and books. Graham often examines social and philosophical systems of thought or underlying historical contexts in his work; his complex narratives incorporate cultural references and visual puns. Beginning in the early 1980s, Graham used found texts as the basis for bookworks that were at once conceptual and material—inserting bookmarks with additional pages, inserting textual loops or incorporating books into optical devices in artworks.
In 1994, Graham began a series of films and videos in which he himself appears as the principal character. One of these, How I Became a Ramblin’ Man (1999), is the second in a film trilogy of short costume dramas that he produced between 1997 and 2000. The film is a Western genre piece in which the artist, dressed as a benign wandering cowboy, rides his horse through a prairie landscape, eventually stopping to sing a melancholic song about his solitary country life. He then rides away, with each shot mirroring the sequence of his arrival. Like much of Graham’s practice, the film explores the structure of the loop and the playing of a role. The film’s winding structure denies the possibility of narrative resolution, and instead suggests an endlessly repeated journey.
Rodney Graham has exhibited internationally since the 1970s, including numerous touring survey exhibitions in Europe and North America, most recently in 2010 at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany. He has participated in landmark exhibitions, representing Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1997, and exhibiting at documenta IX in 1992 and at Sculpture Project Muenster in 1987. His work is part of major collections held by national and international institutions including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario, National Gallery of Canada, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Gallery, Centre Georges Pompidou and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
