Rodney Graham
Rodney Graham is recognised internationally for his intellectually rigorous art, developed since the mid seventies. His multi layered and complex art includes many diverse media from photographs, installations, music, book works and film, often negotiating between the many different identities and territories and drawing connections between them.
One of Graham’s long-standing artistic fascinations is with the myth of the American West, something he investigates through its cultural familiarity. He focuses on the emblematic figure of the cowboy – poised between cultural reality and cultural mythology. Much of what is known and believed about the West is based entirely upon fiction – mediated through Hollywood films, music, legends and myth. We know little about its actuality. Graham exploits this, creating additional elusive readings and narratives to the enduring myth.
In his new work Dance (2008) Graham continues his conversation with the myth of the West. With his customary deadpan humour, the image depicts a scene from countless Hollywood Westerns: a man being forced to dance in a saloon by another man, six-gun in hand, shooting bullets at his feet. Graham, at the right of the picture, is suspended in mid-air avoiding the bullets. This work, a quotation from Western film and legend, offers another tongue-in-cheek pastiche of an archetypal moment from the genre – good against evil and reciprocal humiliation. By isolating a frequently repeated and peculiar moment Graham questions the ‘true’ origin of every Western scene held in our collective cultural memory.
In his new work Dance (2008) Graham continues his conversation with the myth of the West. With his customary deadpan humour, the image depicts a scene from countless Hollywood Westerns: a man being forced to dance in a saloon by another man, six-gun in hand, shooting bullets at his feet. Graham, at the right of the picture, is suspended in mid-air avoiding the bullets. This work, a quotation from Western film and legend, offers another tongue-in-cheek pastiche of an archetypal moment from the genre – good against evil and reciprocal humiliation. By isolating a frequently repeated and peculiar moment Graham questions the ‘true’ origin of every Western scene held in our collective cultural memory.
