Geoffrey Farmer: a Way out of the Mirror Canadian Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2017 May 13 - November 26, 2017
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GEOFFREY FARMER: A WAY OUT OF THE MIRROR CANADIAN PAVILION, VENICE BIENNALE 2017 MAY 13 - NOVEMBER 26, 2017 A geyser of – Allen Ginsberg reading in Washington Square Park, 1966, book wide open, bearded, right hand in pocket and then myself as a student, curious, sitting on the edge of the fountain in the courtyard of the San Francisco Art Institute waiting anxiously for a John Cage performance to begin in 1991. A duvet freshly slept in by Karl after an LSD trip in the rock formations of the Maggi River, I had to drive us to the airport the next day. The memory of standing on a cliff on the edge of the Pacific Ocean spreading the ashes of an acquaintance who died of complications due to AIDS. Listening to Kathy Acker read Gertrude Stein’s Tender buttons with Jay DeFeo’s The Rose entombed in the wall behind her and the view of Alcatraz from that conference room. The discovery by my sister of photographs from 1955 of a collision between a train and my grandfather’s lumber truck. The grandfather I never knew, whose death somehow was connected to this event, whose name I removed from my name at age 23. The death of an architect, the founder of BBPR, who died in the Gusen concentration camp. Gian Luigi Banfi. Ten years later the firm designed our Pavilion. A page from an epic poem that quotes an artist “the key is in the sunlight,” page 33, Kaddish. Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled, water from Walden Pond. An image of a man penetrated by a wide variety of weapons like the ones found in Johannes de Ketham’s Fasciculus Medicinae, Venice, 1491. A tortoise stool found in the coffee room of a foundry meant for the chief to sit on. Germaine Richier’s La Mante, grande (1946 – 1951) as a self-portrait at age 18, when I didn’t die like I thought I would. Pieces of metal removed from the ruins of Peter Pitseolak High School which burned down in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, and the promise I made to help rebuild its library. A livestock water trough that survived WWII in an open field in St. Gallen, Switzerland, given to me as a gift from a farmer. Masegni stones found by Luca, excavated in the Euganean Hills some as old as the 1600s. 20 minutes from August 15th, beginning at 2:00pm, the women set on fire on a train heading north and what Karl told me at 1am the night before about his father and what fathers can do and I understood too. Dug through the foundation of the pavilion using a shovel and pick-axe from WWI, bought from a museum 400 meters away. Dug into the Napoleonic rubble from the former Castello district, demolished in the 18th century to make way for the Giardini, and all the rubble piled up to create the hill where the pavilion sits. My restlessness, anxiety of never seeing the whole. The loss, the lost ones, hoping to escape, while I sat looking at my phone, not knowing and unable to help while they were drowning. My teared-up eyes of the news of Luca’s death and the memory of the last cigarette I smoked of his next to the doorway soon to be punched out of the side of the pavilion. The garden behind butchered by the workers to make way for a deck that has yet to be built. The surprise of the metal fence put up at the last minute. The struggle for the removal of the Canada sign; if it is still on the front of the pavilion, I lost. The war reparation money in every brick. The 71 planks from my grandfather’s accident printed using a lithographic process; at first I thought they were exclamation marks, and then later, peacock feathers. The myth of how the peacock got its coloured feathers by eating the poison berries of the garden. All this, as I stand here, looking out at the lagoon. All souls, all living, all gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes, all nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages, all identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe, all lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future. This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d, and shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them. –Geoffrey Farmer Geoffrey Farmer (b. 1967, Vancouver) lives and works in Vancouver, BC. His work has been exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions at venues such as Vancouver Art Gallery (2015); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2014); Kunstverein Hamburg (2014); Perez Art Museum, Miami (2014); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2014); Migros Museum, Zurich (2013); Mercer Union, Toronto (2013); Nottingham Contemporary (2013); Barbican Art Gallery, London (2013); and Witte de With, Rotterdam (2008). The artist has been featured in exhibitions at Steirischer Herbst, Graz, Austria (2015); Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond (2015); The Louvre, Paris (2015); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2012); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2012); Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn (2011); Zab- ludowicz Collection Curatorial Open 2011, London (2011); 12th Istanbul Biennial, curated by Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Pedrosa (2011); and CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2011). Farmer’s work is included in the permanent collections of CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; the Cleveland Museum of Art; Tate Modern, London; Vancouver Art Gallery; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Geoffrey Farmer The Care With Which The Rain Is Wrong September 17 - November 12, 2017 Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin Geoffrey Farmer explores the art, cultural and political history of humankind by continuously investigating their im- age reservoirs and narratives. Farmer meticulously collects images, objects and sounds of different subjects over long periods of time in order to assemble extensive installations that remain in a continuous state of transforma- tion. Through the media of photography, video, sculpture, drawing and text Farmer explores how each field influ- ences our perception and in which way the pictorial becomes a requisite and actor in our interpretation. For the work ‘Boneyard,’ presented in the octagon of the Schinkelklause, Farmer transforms a collection of art monographs, Maestri Della Scultura, printed by the Milanese publishers and brothers, Fratelli Fabbri. Cutting each sculptural reproduction out, he places them, free-standing on a large circular plinth forming a network of free- association. From antiquity to modern times the narratives of the individual figures and personalities placed in the rotunda intertwine as they stand as witnesses of their time and world views. Working in the tradition of the literary cut-out, tarot, dice-rolling and astrology, Farmer creates groupings and an accompanying text which trace the history of political turmoil in Italy at the time of their printing during the “Years of Lead” (1968 – 82). It was during these years that the Fabbri brother’s came under the radar of the Brigate Rosse, a left-wing paramilitary organiza- tion and were forced to flee Italy in fear of their lives. Inside the glass pavilion, on the first floor, the artist presents ‘Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell’, a computer generated digital slide show, composed of a reservoir of over 17.000 illustrations – an archive, which Farmer continuously refines and expands. A wide spectrum of imagery taken from politics, ethnographic studies, anonymous portraits, as well as from fields such as business, lifestyle, and agriculture turn into an animation and restaging of history. A computer algorithm combines and synchronizes the images of the photographic archive with a collection of sounds into a hypnotic ever changing installation, creating a nearly overwhelming amount of impressions, while at the same time offering endless associative and connective possibilities: an historical and cultural journey through the world as it has been documented over the past 150 years. Details Announced for Geoffrey Farmer’s Canadian Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale BY Alex Greenberger For his Canadian Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, Geof- frey Farmer will once again return to his interest in the re- lationship between people and their pictures. In an installation titled A way out of the mirror, he will draw inspiration from a 1955 group of photographs showing a lumber truck that collided with a moving train. Farmer has a personal con- nection to the photographs: his grandfather, who would himself later die in an accident, was present when they were taken. The Vancouver-based artist never knew that, howev- er, until his sister emailed him the images last year. The installation takes its name from an Allen Ginsberg poem—Farmer recalls hold- ing a copy of Howl, Gins- berg’s 1955 epic poem, when Untitled (Collision), 1955. ARCHIVES OF THE ARTIST he opened his sister’s email. Farmer also remembers listen- ing to Ginsberg sing when, as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991, he first learned about the Venice Biennale. “In his Venice project, Geoffrey once again finds a world enclosed inside an image and an image giving rise to a world,” Kitty Scott, a curator of modern and contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the organizer of the pavilion, said in a state- ment. (Scott worked with Josée Drouin-Brisebois, a curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Canada and the pa- vilion’s project director.) “Personal memory and familial history flow into a broader stream of reflections on inheritance, trauma, and desire.