Dan Graham

American artist Dan Graham is one of the most important contemporary visual artists practicing today. His work over the past four decades is widely recognized for its lead in the advent of conceptualism as an art movement. His work was also instrumental in the development of Vancouver based photo-conceptualism, and his long involvement and friend­ship with a number of locally based artists has been of enormous influence. While his work is featured in collections around the city, Graham has, surprisingly, never been afforded a solo show in Vancouver. This exhibition will provide the opportunity to view a selective survey of the artist's works over the past thirty years and assess the significant effect Graham’s practice has had on the local community.

Essay: "Dan Graham in Vancouver," Ian Wallace

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Grey cube-shaped sculptures are installed inside a display box. On the white wall behind this box, a text-based work about a human body function is printed. 

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A set of three artworks are mounted on a gallery wall. Two of them are text-based works. The rest mimics an advertisement page in a newspaper. 

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A silver film projector is placed on a white table. It projects a film on a gallery wall. The projected blurred image depicts a hand and a green coloured large insect-like shaped object. 

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Two large pedestals sit in a gallery. The one in the front holds a wood and metal made sculpture that roughly resembles a record player. The one in the back holds sculptures in a display box. 

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Five artworks are installed on a gallery wall. A text-based work is placed in between a coloured photograph and a drawing. Two large black and white drawings are mounted in the back. 

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A film projector projects a moving image on a white gallery wall. The film shows a torso of a naked person holding a video camera to a person who was filming. 

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A closeup showing a film projector playing a video on a wall. The video shows a naked person sitting with a camera in their hands, filming.

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On a large plinth placed in the middle of the gallery, six square-shaped sculptures sit. Four framed two-dimensional works are mounted on the walls around this plinth. 

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The historical situation regarding the subject is represented in the exhibition by Margaret Waylor's work on Palladian villas (the first modern detached houses). One of her works, in which the villa is drawn directly onto gyprock, is viewed through the other, a three­ dimensional cement abstracted villa resting on a "kitchen" table with folded down "Palladian" wings. The relation between topography and farmland development is represented by Robert Linsley's paintings of exurban development in the Fraser Valley, and by Amy Jones' new work in which a large (two meter high) map of the Fraser Valley is laminated onto plywood and cut to the outline shape of a dining-room set in front of a picture window thereby setting up an oscillatory echo between what "was" and what “is".

Bill Jones and Nancy Shaw explore the problems associated with the conflicting desire to be in (secure) and out (free) through the formal device of reflections registered photographically.	This is effected in Shaw's case through the use of an actual window frame, and in Jones' with glass over the photographed windows, so the gallery reflections act as a palimpsest to the already existing mirror (the photographed window).

The materialistic over-abundance that characterizes suburban growth is clearly presented in the piece Greg Snider will show — a long drawing/collage in which two double garages form mirror images of excess. (There are two of "everything" within ten feet of each other.)

Warren Murfitt's *Four Model Homes* are plinth mounted, highly abstracted representations of the "object of desire" — a critique of the pseudo-variation offered to acquire “difference." Todd Davis and Dan Graham here develop the formal nature of the "row" and its similarity to minimalist sculpture. Davis' photocopy enlargements from single "tourist" slides into a complex of 11 by 17 inch “shingles" depict the European model of a "normal" development, the contradictions of which are revealed through the use of a text overlay. Dan Graham, who along with Ed Ruscha, can be said to have founded this entire area of artistic practice in the late 1960s, will show three photographs from the enormous body of suburban work he has produced.

The notion of detachment, and the privacy that theoretically comes with it, is the operative metaphor in *Some Detached Houses*. The detachment and newly found distance between people that resulted from the flight to the suburbs is reflected in the detachment, distancing and “objectivity" that permeates the work in this exhibition. The show will be an important meeting of work in an important area of artistic practice. To make an exhibition out of such material constitutes, of course, yet another form of “detachment.”

Essay: “Introduction,” Bill Jeffries

A large photo with 2 smaller photos on either side, all in natural wood frames, on a wall. All the photos show black and white landscapes with small buildings in the corner, and phrases in black text.

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A gallery with several artworks. On one wall there are 3 paintings, on the other there is a painting collage. IN the centre, 4 grey plinths show small metal house-like forms on them.

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A closeup of 4 unframed photos on a white wall. One has an apartment complex with a fence, one shows townhouses, one has similar houses in a row, and one shows a playground in front of apartments.

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A small glass window with white panes rests on a white plinth against the wall of a gallery. The window appears to reflect a living room with a large window and furniture. 

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A closeup of 6 unframed black and white photos on a wall. The photos show houses of various sizes in different neighbourhoods. Some have trees in front, and some are in large fields, etc.

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3 paintings mounted on a white wall. One shows a yellow field with houses in the background. One shows a person sitting at a desk with a book. One shows an orange field with houses in the distance. 

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A painting collage on a white wall. The painting shows 3 cushioned chairs and a table, textured with, and layered in front of, a map showing roads and rivers. 

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Two objects mounted on the wall of a gallery. One is a pale-yellow paper in a dark-green rectangle. Below, there is a light box in the shape of a triangle, showing an image of a wide road with trees.

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Robin Collyer, Bill Jones, Todd Anthony Davis, Greg Snider, Robert Linsley, Warren Murfitt, Amy Jones, Dan Graham, Margaret Waylor, Ed Ruscha, Nancy Shaw

Some Detached Houses

This catalogue was published in 2003 by the Contemporary Art Gallery on the occasion of an exhibition by Dan Graham held at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, from September 24 – November 15, 2003. The publication contains essays by Reid Shier and Ian Wallace.

Dan Graham

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