
Rodney Graham, Halcion Sleep, 1994, video, black-and-white, silent, 26 minutes.
Dublin
RODNEY GRAHAM
Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA)
Royal Hospital
Military Road Kilmainham
November 23–November 30
Curated by Seán Kissane
Rodney Graham has long repudiated endings in favor of reverie-like ingresses to the past; this midcareer sampling of his work, dating from 1993 to 2017, will be a dream, almost. In the video Halcion Sleep, 1994, while drugged in the back of a car, the artist revisits both childhood memories of somnolent travel and Warhol’s Sleep. In Rheinmetall/Victoria 8, 2003, a 1961 Italian projector screens artificial snow falling on a pristine 1930s German typewriterdefunct technologies pairing to fabricate ethereality. Since 2007, in scrupulously mocked-up, hugely appealing light-box mise-en-scènes, Graham has guised himself, inter alia, as a well-heeled amateur artist perpetuating Morris Louis’s stylistics after his final show, and an old-school jazz drummer thoughtful over a steak supper. One of his own albums is titled Why Look for Good Times?, but assuredly Graham is an optimist. His oneiric fakeries always come barnacled with enigma and open-endedness, rewinding to move forwardor at least to move.