Rodney Graham
William Rodney Graham (January 16, 1949 – October 22, 2022) was a Canadian visual artist and musician. He was closely associated with the Vancouver School. Early life Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, on January 16, 1949. He studied art history at the University of British Columbia and subsequently went to Simon Fraser University (SFU). He intended to concentrate on writing and literature before taking a modern art course taught by Ian Wallace at SFU. Work Coming out of Vancouver's 1970s photoconceptual tradition, Graham's work is often informed by historical literary, musical, philosophical, and popular references. He was most often associated with other west coast Canadian artists, including Vikky Alexander, Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, Roy Arden, and Ken Lum. During the late 1970s, he played electric guitar in the band UJ3RK5 with fellow visual artists Wall on keyboards and Ian Wallace on electric bass, among others. His wide-ranging and often genre-busting work frequently engaged with technologies of the past: literary, psychological, and musical texts, optical devices, and film as a historical medium. Among his earliest works is Camera Obscura (1979; destroyed 1981) a site-specific work that consisted of a shed-sized optical device on his family's farm field near Abbotsford,