BLOWING THE ROOF OFF A PERSONAL PAST
Celebrated artist opens project at Venice Biennale as a coming to terms with family and Canadian history
Geoffrey Farmer is among Canada’s best-known art world exports, so it’s no surprise he’d be pegged to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale, opening Saturday. What might be a little surprising is Farmer’s project: An explosive flaying of the Canada pavilion, with the roof torn off, the walls removed, and two-by-fours scattered hither and yon amid a perpetual shower from a gushing fountain at its core.
Nods to his best-known works are nowhere to be found. References to the array of works he’s shown in Toronto in recent years are slight to non-existent. In their place, a crouching mantis-like cast bronze figure contemplates a book amid the downpour, while a grandfather clock sports an axe buried in its hide.
The figure, a teenage effigy of Farmer himself, marks the personal nature of the piece. Catalyzed by the artist’s discovery of unpublished press images of his grandfather’s death before he was born, when his lumber truck collided with a train in British Columbia, Farmer’s installation, A way out of
the mirror, is his way of dragging old family traumas out of the shadows and into the light.
We spoke to him in Venice on the eve of the opening.
It seems like every artist who represents Canada at Venice has had to wrestle with the confines of the building, and now you’re living out every one of their fantasies by literally tearing it apart.
From the beginning I wanted the building to be part of the project and it just happened to be about to undergo a restoration . . . The project has really been about learning about my own past and my family’s past, and understanding certain dramatic events that occurred — the collision, my grandfather’s death — that were never really talked about. In some ways the project was about tearing the roof off, really, with my family around all of that, and the emotion and catharsis that go along with it.
The word I keep thinking of is rupture: something torn open and whatever’s been trapped inside exploding outward. Is it too much to read that as a metaphor for what the country is experiencing, in this strange Canada 150 moment?
The building has the name “Canada” right there on it and, of course, nationhood is on everyone’s mind right now. So I could look at the collision . . . that occurred 150 years ago. The history of conquering and destruction and trauma are definitely at the root of this project.
It’s really compelling how your personal reconciliation story seems to mesh with a larger narrative unfolding about the country.
My grandfather, who I never knew, never talked much to my father. They lived in poverty, he had a lumber truck and he had many different jobs. It was a very tough existence for my father, and then losing his own father, around 21 or 22, was hard. But for me, growing up as a gay kid in the ’70s, was difficult . . . I experienced a lot of violence, or threats of violence . . . I had so much fear in dealing with those subjects; it loomed over me in such a way that it was hard for me to even consider talking to my own father about these things. And that’s reflected in our country: we also want to avoid uncomfortable conversations or the admittance of guilt.
Everything about this project seems almost like nothing you’ve ever done before.
I know! (Laughs) I felt from the very beginning that I wanted to use this opportunity to step into a new world. I think there was a point where my work was becoming so broad historically I started to think, “Where am I in this?” So this was almost like a collapse into myself — my own story, but also the story of Canada.
The piece is called “A way out of the mirror,” and while I know you’re fond of poetic aphorisms, that’s not it at all here, is it?
No. Think of it this way: there’s a new exit out of the pavilion, in the back. And to me, that was one of the most important aspects of what I wanted to do. It’s all the work really hits for me: you can enter and you can leave, in a completely different way, and you can see all the way through it. For me, that’s what “a way out of a mirror” is, getting beyond these ideas, shattering them and moving on to a new understanding.