Anton Bruehl
Christine Davis
Stan Douglas
Walker Evans
Geoffrey Farmer
CAO FEI
Greg Girard
Mike Grill
shari hatt
Fred Herzog
J Kuhn
Jacques-Henri Lartigue
Tim Lee
JUDY LINN
Kyla Mallett
LASZLO MOHOLY-NAGY
Dick Oulton
Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii
Danny Singer
John Vanderpant
Johannes Wohnseifer
ANONYMOUS
ANONYMOUS (SPIRIT)

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Geoffrey Farmer
Plinth Study (Pale Fire Freedom Machine), 2005

Light jet (endura archival photo paper)
Image dimensions 91.5 x 122 cm
Edition 2/3
Image courtesy the artist and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver

ESTIMATE $4,500 - $6,000

Vancouver-based artist Geoffrey Farmer's installations combine video, film, performance, drawing, sculptural elements, found objects and texts, and join provocative readings of popular culture with highly imaginative uses of gallery architecture. Born in 1967, Farmer studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design. Known for his research-based projects that result in multimedia installations, Farmer has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Power Plant, Toronto, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver and at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. A 2003 recipient of the VIVA Award, he has forthcoming exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montréal and Tate Modern in London.  

Farmer has developed a theoretically rigorous body of work. Through an aesthetics of accumulation, his process-based installations involve complex systems that combine numerous intertextual references. His interest in the latent potential of the gallery as a site for social engagement has led to the development of a number of works that combine the artist’s meticulous historical research with diverse and provocative sculptural applications, such as Wash House (2004), a working laundry facility for art school students inside a gallery and a performative installation at Catriona Jeffries Gallery in 2006 that featured the fuselage of an airplane relic. In the installation Pale Fire, Farmer used the Nabakov novel of the same name as a conceptual starting point for an ambitious installation. Over the course of two month exhibition, hundreds of pieces of used furniture were methodically dismantled and burned in a large, modernist fireplace installed in the gallery. In conjunction, Farmer produced a series of photographs depicting ‘stacks’ of this furniture, and the disparate social and cultural histories of their materials. This diptych--of stacked chairs and chest of drawers--is typical of Farmer’s conceptualist ideas about appropriation and translation, and to his provocative aesthetic approach.