MOCA Pacific Design Center
Artist, writer, musician, and actor Rodney Graham's witty, intellectual approach to art made him an international star and icon of the Canadian art scene. Sometimes affiliated with the Vancouver School of photoconceptualism, which included Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, Vikky Alexander, and other important contemporary artists, Graham generated inventive new ways of analyzing landscape, literature, pop culture, and music in art, including with film, photography, sculpture, sound, and installation.
Rodney Graham: A Little Thought focuses on the artist’s film, video, and sound work, which dominated his production in the 1990s. The exhibition includes films and videos, related models, photographs, archival material, and a CD compilation of sound works and music performed by Graham and his band, UJ3RK5. Highlights of the show include Graham’s Camera Obscura Mobile (1989), a camera obscura in the form of a 1904 US mail rural delivery carriage; Reading Machine for Lenz (1993), an optical sculpture manipulating the first 1,434 words of Georg Büchner’s Lenz (1836); Aberdeen (2000), a low-tech, out-of-sync “music video” synthesizing rock samples and photos of Kurt Cobain’s titular birth town.
Rodney Graham: A Little Thought is organized by Grant Arnold and Jessica Bradley, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.