Rodney Graham – That’s Not Me (Baltic 2017)
Rodney Graham – That’s Not Me, recently held at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle in the UK, posed the central question ‘What does it mean to consider yourself an artist today?’ Through combining various media in which the Canadian artist Rodney Graham (b. 1949) works, his ‘genre-defying’ (exhib. guide) practice variously answered this question. While this was not without some fair effort on the part of the spectator, in return for this, the curators had afforded plenty of space in which to explore ideas and reach divergent conclusions. Most prominent among the exhibits for their manner of display, size and preponderance were the large-format photographs, mounted in lightboxes, which appeared to document quite unremarkable scenes, such as a lighthouse keeper warming his feet as he snoozes in his kitchen (‘Lighthouse Keeper with Lighthouse Model, 1955’, 2010). Alone after a day’s work, we imagine that the model of the lighthouse (presumably a replica of its custodian...