Vancouver artist makes it to Venice Biennale roster
Geoffrey Farmer to represent Canada at world’s splashiest, best-attended art exhibition
Geoffrey Farmer, the Vancouver artist whose remarkably inventive reconfigurations of image and sound have won him a near-unrivalled international career among his Canadian peers, will represent Canada at the 2017 Venice Biennale, the National Gallery has announced.
National Gallery director Marc Mayer invited Farmer to represent the country in September, when the artist happened to be travelling in Europe.
“It’s nice to finally be able to talk about it,” he laughed in a phone interview from his studio in Vancouver. “I felt like it was the right time for me to take on the challenge.”
Indeed, the Venice process has never been an uncomplicated one for the many artists who have accepted its burden. The Biennale, which spills out of its historic home in the Giardini Publicci and into the city itself with hundreds of complex projects produced both by national governments and independent curators, is the splashiest and best-attended international art event in the world.
While it can make an artist more visible to a global audience than ever before, with the weight of national expectation and a tight timeline, it’s as gruelling a process as any artist can expect to endure.
But Farmer, 48, long regarded as one of this country’s most significant contemporary artists, has experience producing large-scale commissions for high-profile international affairs. One of his most accomplished pieces, Leaves of Grass, was among the centrepieces of Documenta 13 in 2012, the international contemporary art showcase in Kassel, Germany. Widely regarded as the bellwether exhibition of the interna- tional art world, Documenta is staged only once every five years. The piece, now owned by the National Gallery, was on display there until March of this year. A monumental work in which 16,000 images clipped from 50 years of LIFE magazine were affixed to long, flexible reeds so that the entire assemblage would shiver and sway with the slightest breeze, Leaves of Grass fast became a global phenomenon, connecting an international art world already familiar with Farmer’s work to the intensive detail and conceptual rigour with which he approaches it.
It also helped him to feel comfortable enough to accept the Venice commission. As a little insurance, he enlisted Kitty Scott, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s curator of modern and contemporary art, as curator for the project. Scott was part of the international Documenta team in 2012 and worked with Farmer on the Leaves of Grass project.
“Having done Documenta, I know it’s a journey and an adventure,” he says. “It helps to know the people on the journey with you are up for it.”
The commission comes as the most recent in a string of accolades for Farmer, whose career survey at the Vancouver Art Gallery, titled How Do I Fit This Ghost In My Mouth?, closed in September. This fall, he was also showing at the Louvre in Paris and is readying for an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London in the new year.
Audiences here should have some familiarity with Farmer as well. He’s been a frequent presence here in recent years, most lately at the Luminato Festival last summer. His piece Look In My Face; My Name is Might- Have-Been; I Am Also Called NoMore, Too-Late, Farewell, a towering LED screen installed in Trinity Bellwoods Park that flooded the leafy scene with a constant flow of sound and image, functioned around the clock.
The year before, his Iskowitz Prize exhibition in the AGO’s Henry Moore Sculpture Centre reconfigured the much-loved space into something alien and dynamically transformative. Before that, in 2013, Mercer Union here presented A Light in the Moon, where his Luminato work debuted alongside Boneyard, a close cousin to Leaves of Grass.
The commission also comes as the National Gallery has made great strides to stabilize its Venice process. Earlier this year, the Sobey Foundation announced the establishment of a $2-million endowment for Canada’s Venice Biennale entry, defraying some of the strain of fundraising that typically accompanies the process.