Rodney Graham

Oxfordshire Oak, Banford, Fall , 2002

Monochrome color print
29 x 22.5 cm, Framed: 48.2 x 41.3 x 3 cm
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Since the later 1970s, Graham has used the camera obscura in the portable form it came to assume in the course of its historical development beginning in the 17th century, with a pinhole camera, equipped with lenses. The method of inversion that results from the use of the optics of the camera obscura not only constitutes an analogy to the manner of functioning of the human eye, it also possesses its own artistic tradition. In 1961, Piero Manzoni set the entire world on its head by furnishing a pedestal with the upside-down inscription Socle du Monde. More explicit is Graham’s reverence for Robert Smithson’s 1969 photo series Upside Down Trees, whose roots literally grow upward into the sky. Graham is concerned in his tree photographs with the “representation of nature”, one, however, that escapes classical reproduction via inversion, thereby perhaps rendering recognizable the romantic desire for an unmediated experience of nature. If the camera obscura was regarded in the 17th and 18th centuries as a refuge of truth because it was an optical instrument designed to produce precisely detailed reproductions of reality, it is here used as the acme of procedures for dissembling, concealing, and deforming truth. (Dorothea Zwirner)

Rodney Graham, *1949 Masqui, Vancouver, Canada