Rodney Graham: Who does not love a tree?

Rodney Graham’s 15th show with Lisson Gallery explores the late artist’s longstanding relationship to the natural world through two major bodies of work related to trees: the large-format photographs of upside-down Oxfordshire Oaks (1990) and a two-screen, immersive video environment entitled Edge of a Wood (1999). Stemming from his use of both the camera obscura and the cinematic techniques associated with movie-making, these two early meditations on the tree as both solitary, spectacular object and as a performative, brooding presence, will be accompanied by a new ‘accidental novella’ in 100-word bursts, such as the above, by author Max Porter (known for Lanny and Grief is a Thing with Feathers among other books). In this publication, Porter connects Graham’s many different voices and disguises to the mercurial uniqueness of trees as endlessly branching marvels, or “thirty-thousand armed monsters” as the writer puts it. In another seminal film installation, Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong, 1969 from 2006, Graham inhabits one of his most beloved characters, a musician or artist nonchalantly throwing his percussive tubers for an expectant audience.

In many ways this exhibition takes Rodney Graham back to his roots as an artist concerned with the connection between humans and nature, but particularly with the many devices and methods that we have developed to document and understand this relationship. His early interest in the pinhole camera led to him build a walk-in structure in a field outside Vancouver in 1979, where one could observe a solitary tree in the darkened space, flipped upside down and singled out among many. This experiential outdoor project led to a two-decade series of tree photographs – which read almost as portraits of heroic individuals – using a large-format camera, while retaining the inversion of the camera lucida, seemingly for iconic or comedic effect, but fundamentally because this is how our eyes perceive images before the brain corrects them.