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. The pavilion itself, colliding with the artwork, is transformed, opening to the outside as its architecture is reimagined in the guise of a fountain.” Farmer’s past work has involved creating dense histories of the world using images. For Documenta 13 in 2012, he showed Leaves of Grass, a work that offered an exhaustive picture of nearly the whole 20th century in the form of clippings from Life magazine. His work was recently surveyed at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Greenberger, Alex, “Details Annouced for Geoffrey Farmer’s Canadian Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, Artnews, February 21, 2017 Geoffrey Farmer, Boneyard, 2013. Paper cutouts, wood, and glue, dimensions variable. Installation view, Cut nothing, cut parts, cut the whole, cut the order of time, Casey Kaplan, New York, 2014. Photo Jean Vong. Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York. © 2016 Geoffrey Farmer Geoffrey Farmer (b. 1967, Vancouver) is best known for his installations and large- scale, sculptural photo collages. This immersive survey of the artist’s recent major “paper works” presents room-sized installations composed of hundreds of small sculptures made of cutout photographs, fabric, and various supports. In these re- cent works, processions of figures assembled from fragments of book and maga- zine photography and illustration manifest the artist’s interest in the cross-pollination of historical and vernacular imagery. Each spectacular composition begins to chart the historical contours of our image-saturated contemporary culture, and suggest the recurring cultural themes and formal patterns. Farmer uses movement, sound, animation, puppet characters, and a panoply of highly choreographed bodies and characters to investigate world history from the different angles of its photographic and sculptural accounts. ART REVIEW Geoffrey Farmer’s art at the ICA: Once you’ve seen it, you can’t shake it By Sebastian Smee APRIL 14, 2016 Detail of Geoffrey Farmer’s “Boneyard.” Modest prediction: A lot of people — teenagers, aunties, granddads, you name it — are going to come out of the Geoffrey Farmer exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art with a bit of an art crush. I know I did. Even now, as I write at my desk just a few hours later, I can’t seem to shake it. What have I just seen? Three bodies of work — or really, three works — in three medium-size rooms, all by Geoffrey Farmer, an artist from Vancouver in his late 40s who recently was selected to represent Canada at the next Venice Biennale. All three of the show’s component parts are great to look at. But the first, in which Farmer has installed 365 handmade sculptures on a forest of tall plinths and on shelves stacked high on the wall, is by far the most impressive. Smee, Sebastian, “Geoffrey Farmer’s art at the ICA: Once you’ve seen it, you can’t shake it”, The Boston Globe (online), April 14, 2016 JANUARY 2016 Geoffrey Farmer ICA - INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, BOSTON BOSTON April 13–July 31 Curated by Dan Byers Geoffrey Farmer succinctly noted, some months back, “My work appears to me as wreckage”—articulating the formal-pileup effect of his exploded-collage installations, the air of obsolescence emanating from the vintage print media he uses so pointedly, and even the way his hundreds of Frankensteined cutouts swarm like the undead and Geoffrey Farmer, Boneyard (detail), 2013, paper, wood, glue, dimensions variable. stand at attention. He captures that intoxicating Benjaminian Photo: Jean Vong. sensation that we experience when faced, like the angel of history, with the quantities of accretion and devastation that constitute the stuff of the archive and “progress.” Monumental, room-size stagings of the miniature, including Boneyard, 2013, and The Surgeon and the Photographer, 2009–13, will be featured in this survey of Farmer’s recent paper sculptures, a mostly medium-specific presentation with the notable exception of a computer-generated algorithmic slide show. An artist-driven publication, with a text by the curator, will accompany the exhibition. — Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer Lehrer-Graiwer, Sarah, “Preview: Boston: Geoffrey Farmer at the ICA”, Artforum, Vol. 54, No. 5, January 2016, pg. 133 POSTED DECEMBER 11, 2015 Geoffrey Farmer will Represent Canada at 2017 Venice Biennale Geoffrey Farmer has been nominated to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2017. Farmer has selected Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario Carol and Morton Rapp Curator Kitty Scott to organize the Canadian pavilion. Over the course of his twenty-year career, Farmer has had exhibitions at the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art in Zurich; the Louvre in Paris; Documenta 13 in Kassel; the Tate Modern in London; and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, among other exhibitions and institutions. “Geoffrey Farmer will represent Canada at 2017 Venice Biennale”, Artforum (online, December 11, 2015 GEOFFREY FARMER WILL REPRESENT CANADA AT THE 2017 VENICE BIENNALE Installation view of Geoffrey Farmer’s Leaves of Grass at the Neue Galerie at BY Andrew Russeth Documenta 13, in Kassel, Germany. What a time to be Canadian. Just a few weeks ago the nation elected the handsome, young leader of its Liberal Party, Justin Trudeau, to be its prime minister, and late last night he welcomed newly arrived Syrian refugees in Toronto. Now news comes from the north that the nation has tapped the excellent Geoffrey Farmer to represent it at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Farmer, who was born in 1967 and works in Vancouver, has made his name with sculptures that he makes by carefully slicing images out of books and magazines and affixing them to thin sticks. Shown in arrange- ments that range from just a few pictures to sprawling installations, his works are variously intimate, whimsi- cal, and deeply moving, and often all those things at once. At Documenta 13, in Kassel, Germany, in 2012, Farmer offered up a masterpiece, titled Leaves of Grass, which featured images snipped from LIFE magazines spanning the years 1935 to 1985. Arranged on sticks as a dense forest along a 124-foot-long platform in the city’s Neue Galerie, it presented a stunning, impos- sible-to-digest history of the 20th century. Farmer has also made larger, deceptively simple sculptures with anthropomorphic and kinetic characteris- tics, like those that appeared in his superb one-person exhibition “Let’s Make the Water Turn Black,” which appeared at the Migros Museum in Zurich, Nottingham Contemporary, the Kunstverein Hamburg, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, in 2013 and 2014. (It was one of the finest shows I saw last year. In April, the ICA Boston will bring Farmer’s work stateside for a survey of his paper works.) Kitty Scott, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, is serving as curator of the Canada’s pavilion, and selected Farmer. Josée Drouin-Brisebois, senior curator of contemporary art at National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa, is on board as the pavilion’s project director. “Some of the most complex and extraordinary works to emerge on the Canadian scene over the last ten years were made by Geoffrey Farmer,” Marc Mayer, the director and CEO of the National Gallery, said in a statement. Hear, hear! Though I would be fully confident replacing the phrase “the Canadian scene” in that quote with “the entire international art scene.” Russeth, Andrew, “Geoffrey Farmer will represent Canada at the 2017 Venice Biennale”, ArtNews (online), December 11, 2015 FEATURES Geoffrey Farmer’s Salvage Economy BY AMY LUO Geoffrey Farmer is used to looking back. The Vancouver artist is something of an archaeologist: he sur- veys cultural terrains for images, text and sound, and presents the artifacts in evocative ways that trigger both recognition and estrangement. In 2012, Farmer attracted international attention at Documenta 13 with Leaves of Grass, a 124-foot stretch of an installation composed of Life magazine cut-outs spanning six decades and 1,005 issues in 16,000 figures. On home turf in 2013, Farmer was awarded the presti- gious Gershon Iskowitz Prize in recognition of his significant contribution to the visual arts in Canada.