On December 4, a group of British Columbia based artists will remember Rodney Graham as an artist, musician, and friend. Hosted by David Wisdom, the evening will unfold with a few words and visual presentations by Neil Wedman, Carol Sawyer, Karin Bubas and Pete Bourne, Robert Kleyn, Tim Lee, Kathy Slade and Brady Cranfield of The Music Appreciation Society.

Rodney Graham was an internationally admired artist who created a remarkable range of work in many disciplines, including film, painting, writing, photography, design, performance and music. He had an astonishingly wide interest in popular culture, history, literature, food and clothes. Rodney will be remembered as much for his conversational flow and his kind and generous companionship as he will for his tremendous art.

Doors at 6:30pm
Presentations at 7:00pm

Admission is by a suggested donation of $10-$20, courtesy of BMO Financial Group.

RSVPs are helpful

About the Artists

David Wisdom is best known across Canada for his thirty years on the CBC Radio network as host and producer of music programs such as Nightlines and Pearls Of Wisdom. He was a member of several bands including The Young Winstons and UJ3RK5. Wisdom has been taking photographs since the mid 1960s, and his work has been exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Equinox and Teck Galleries in Vancouver, The Gordon Smith Gallery in North Vancouver, and ArtSpring and Fault Line Projects on Salt Spring Island. Wisdom has also been presenting multi-artist slide shows in several venues throughout Canada, the USA and the UK, and his events were part of the cultural programs at the Vancouver Art Gallery for nine years.

Neil Wedman was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1954. Making paintings stands at the core of thirty years of studio practice, but he has devoted almost equal attention to producing drawings and works on paper including print editions, book-works and photographs. He has also made a number of short films and musical recordings although not many of the latter. He lives and works in Vancouver and is represented there by the Equinox Gallery. Neil Wedman has been a sessional instructor teaching studio courses for the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University since 2000 and at Emily Carr University since 1991.

Karin Bubaš, born in 1976 in North Vancouver, is a photo-based artist that now lives in Tsawwassen. She studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design and graduated in 1998. Bubaš has exhibited nationally and internationally, most notably in Paris, Brussels and Washington D.C. Exhibitions have included Karin Bubaš; A Short History of Subjects and Objects at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris and Garden of Shadows at The Audain Museum.

Pete Bourne is a Canadian drummer known for his work with the Rodney Graham Band from 2002 until Graham’s passing in 2022. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2000, he continued to record and perform with artists including Copyright, A.C. Newman, Neko Case, and Destroyer until touring became too difficult. Known for his precision, warmth, and musical sensitivity, Bourne’s work remains admired across the Canadian music community.

Born in Amsterdam, Robert Kleyn studied mathematics and architecture at UBC and was active in early photo-conceptual, video and projection-based art in Vancouver. His early seventies slide works and photographs were often performative as in his 1976 exhibition with Rodney Graham at Pender Street Gallery. In addition to exhibiting in Canada, he had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy where he lived from the mid-70's until 1990, and in New York where he was associated with the interdisciplinary groups Colab Projects and Machine Language. Kleyn has worked in theatre and film, in addition to an ongoing practice in sculpture, installation, and photography. He has taught architecture and has done numerous art-related projects and collaborations with other artists since moving back to Vancouver in 2003. His artworks are in public and private collections.

Tim Lee is an artist who lives in Vancouver. Working with photography, video, text and sculpture, his work both replicates and reimagines seminal moments in art history and popular culture. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions including the DAAD Galerie, Berlin; Hayward Gallery, London; Asia Society, New York; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; and the CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco. He has participated in various international group exhibitions at the Haus der Kunst, Munich; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and biennials in Shanghai, Istanbul, Sydney and Yokohama. His work is included in many international collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; and the Reina Sofia, Madrid. He is represented by Lisson Gallery in London/New York and Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle in Munich.

Kathy Slade (b. 1966, Montreal) is an artist, writer, curator, editor, and publisher. She works across mediums and has produced textile works, prints, sculpture, film, video, performance, music projects, and publications. Slade’s solo exhibitions include Wherever You Go, Monica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver (2020); This is a Chord. This is Another., Surrey Art Gallery (2018); and Blue Monday, 4COSE, London (2017). Her work has recently been included in group exhibitions at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Fluc, Vienna; and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver. In 2009, Slade was awarded the VIVA Award from the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts. She currently teaches at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.

Brady Cranfield is a sound and visual artist, musician, writer, avid listener, and an uninvited guest on the stolen, occupied, and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh people. He has an MA in Communications and an MFA, both from Simon Fraser University, and is currently a PhD student at SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, as well.

Carol Sawyer (she/her) is a visual artist and singer working with photography, installation, video, and improvised music. Since the early 1990’s her visual art work has investigated the connections between photography and fiction, performance, memory, and history. Her ongoing and expansive project, The Natalie Brettschneider Archive, was exhibited at the Calgary Contemporary in Calgary Alberta in 2023. A book about this project, titled Carol Sawyer: The Natalie Brettschneider Archive, was published in 2020 by the Carleton University Art Gallery, in conjunction with the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and the Koffler Art Gallery in Toronto. In 2022, she collaborated on the project Listening to Pictures: Artists on the SFU Art Collection, which was curated by Kimberly Phillips and exhibited at SFU Galleries in Vancouver. In 2017 The Canada Council awarded Sawyer the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography. In 2021, she was nominated for the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Award.

Banner Image: Rodney Graham, Oak, Kaggevinne, 1989.