Geoffrey Farmer

2008 WITTE DE WITH, CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART EXHIBITION

Apr 3 to Jun 1, 2008

The first major solo exhibition in Europe of the work of Geoffrey Farmer, following his survey currently on display at Montreal’s Musée d’art contemporain, at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. Farmer creates complex installations that consist of multiple elements distributed throughout the gallery space. These installations activate narratives, which are drawn from diverse sources including social history, popular culture, art history and literature. The exhibition at Witte de With was a playful experiment that re-explores an existing work titled Airliner Open Studio (2006). It featured elements of story-telling, writing, performance and process-based sculpture.

Airliner Open Studio is a work structured around a full-scale aircraft cabin, complete with seats, overhead lockers, emergency lighting and cabin windows. Composed of real and false components, this installation transforms the gallery into a stage-set, revealing the influence of the film industry (ever-present in Vancouver) on Farmer’s work, and his fascination with the theatrical: with staging, improvisation, role-play and self-disguise. The artist used this interior as a rehearsal space, and as a starting point for a number of performances – some scripted, some improvised, alone and with others – performed live in the exhibition space or recorded on video and then presented in the gallery.

Farmer’s preoccupation with the theatrical is also evident in the form adopted by his exhibitions, which enact a real-time staging of change and evolution. Seeking to challenge the apparent timeless neutrality of the gallery and to render the processes of construction visible, he inverts the usual temporality of the exhibition format. Instead of the opening night marking the completion of an installation period, for Farmer it is merely the beginning. He often transforms his installations over the course of an exhibition, working through the night to create changes for visitors to discover each morning, with new elements appearing, others disappearing or being translated into new forms. In this way, his work is “actively worked out in front of the viewer over the duration of the exhibition” (artist’s statement, 2007).

Farmer was at Witte de With throughout April, making frequent changes to his installation. For this reason, visitors in the first month of the exhibition were given tickets that allow them to revisit the show, in order to highlight the importance of transformation and process in Farmer’s work.

Geoffrey Farmer

Witte de With published a Source Book on Farmer’s work, edited by Nicolaus Schafhausen, Monika Szewczyk and Zoë Gray, featuring an introduction by Nicolaus Schafhausen, essays by Diedrich Diederichsen, Thierry Davila and Vanessa Desclaux, and an interview with the artist by Zoë Gray.
ISBN: 978-90-73362-79-6

Curators: Zoë Gray, Nicolaus Schafhausen

Artist: Geoffrey Farmer
(born 1967, Eagle Island British Columbia, Canada) lives and works in Vancouver. Recent solo exhibitions: Geoffrey Farmer, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2008); The Last Two Million Years, The Drawing Room, London; Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sunderland; and Spacex, Exeter (all UK, 2007); Pale Fire Freedom Machine, Power Plant Gallery, Toronto (2005); The Blacking Factory, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2002). Recent group exhibitions: The World As A Stage, Tate Modern, London (2007), and ICA Boston (2008); Gasoline Rainbows, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (all 2007); Classified Materials, Vancouver Art Gallery; and Intertidal: Vancouver Art & Artists, MuHKA, Antwerp (both 2005). Farmer attended the San Francisco Institute of Art (1991-92) and the Emily Carr College of Art and Design (1993).

Supported by: Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia

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