At the center of Vancouver artist Rodney Graham’s latest exhibition, a series of four light-box–mounted transparencies join together to form a single huge image of a gray-haired man, in a vintage double-breasted suit, vacuuming the carpet of a tony art gallery. Loopy abstractions in heavy frames line the walls, while a doorway into an adjoining room reveals a woman in a salmon pink dress admiring one of the paintings.
Graham’s pitch-perfect simulation of a mid-century gallery appears straightforward until the details begin to sink in. In this shrine of high modernism—a cult predicated on the genius of artistic discovery—the vacuum turns out to be an old Eureka-brand model, while in a reversal of traditional gender roles, the woman levels the appraising gaze as the elegant, pipe-smoking man (played by Graham himself in a pose based on a 1949 photo of New York dealer, Samuel Kootz) does the cleaning.
The wry ironies continue to mount elsewhere in the show. Graham has included five actual canvases, textured with sand and derived distantly from Synthetic Cubism, which resemble the examples in the photo—and like them, look both familiar and generic.
Too interesting and accomplished to be mere props, yet too anachronistic and goofy to succeed on their own, these compositions refuse to fail correctly. Other photographic self-portraits of Graham reinforce the exhibit’s air of the comically forlorn, including one picture in which a heavily tatted version of the artist stands on an apartment balcony like a retired hipster. Through this sly conceptual comedy of unmet aspirations, Graham examines art and life through a deadpan lens of melancholy.