Rodney Graham

The life and work of enigmatic Dutch/Californian conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, who in 1975 disappeared under mysterious circumstances at sea in the smallest boat ever to cross the Atlantic. As seen through the eyes of fellow emigrant filmmaker René Daalder, the picture becomes a sweeping overview of contemporary art films as well as an epic saga of the transformative powers of the ocean.

In How I Became a Ramblin’ Man, shot in widescreen format, Rodney Graham casts himself in the role of a cowboy roaming a pastoral British Columbia landscape on horseback. The opening minutes of the soundtrack evoke the surrounding nature: lapping water, clip-clopping horse hooves and leaves rustling in the wind. Then Graham dismounts to sing a song about a solitary man. At the end of the ballad, he gets back in the saddle and disappears into the tall grass, with his guitar on his back. In this film, the artist revisits the lonesome cowboy myth perpetuated in western movies and country music.

In Vexation Island, which Graham premiered at the Canadian Pavilion of the 1997 Venice Biennale, the artist appears in full shipwrecked sailor mode, lying unconscious under a tree on a paradise island, with a bruise on his head. Played on a neverending loop, the protagonist wakes up every ten minutes to his cosmic joke, shaking the coconut tree and knocking himself out once again.

An avant-garde meditation on obsolete technology. The film is of a 1930s Rheinmetall typewriter owned by the director. The film itself is projected by a 1960s-era Victoria 8 projector. This exhibit was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art.