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 typewriter—defunct 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 forward—or at least to move.

— Martin Herbert