Press Release

Editions

Nicole Klagsbrun is pleased to open her 1996-1997 season at 80 Mercer with selected works from Rodney Graham’s editions. Vancouver-based Graham has participated in many solo and group exhibitions in the U.S., Canada, Europe and his work has been the subject of two major retrospectives as well as numerous catalogues and essays.

The editions are central to Graham’s oeuvre as his working method is based on and deals with repetition, repression and the reworking of themes. By means of barely noticeable but deliberately structured gestures Graham explores how images and objects, communicate their meaning. Playful and poetic the works may take the form of books paintings, photographs, or sculptures and appropriate the work fo a wide range of modern “masters”—Sigmund Freud, Atget, Raymond Roussel, Donald Judd, Dr Seuss. The works are more than mere stylistic parodies, however. Strategies of appropriation, questioning of authority/authorship, and investigations of the culture of ecological protest are used to interpolate that which excluded from modern art into the very archetypes of modern art resulting in a disrupter of antithetical categories.

Often considered not simply complex but resistant to interpretation, Graham’s work requires a commitment on the viewer’s part to go beyond the superficially pleasing yet unyielding surfaces and to delve into he web of philosophical, aesthetic, historical, and social issues in which the work is implicated. By bringing together a diverse selection of Graham’s editions from almost twenty years of work this exhibition seeks to facilitate that process and to render evident the variety, continuity, and richness that are present in the work as a whole.

Nicole Klagsbrun is located at 80 Mercer St. Between Spring and Broome and is open Thursday through Saturday 11AM - 6PM or by appointment. Please contact Ruth Phaneuf or Sandra Gillespie for further information.