PIET ZWART INSTITUTE – MASTER OF FINE ART PRESENTS

Geoffrey Farmer:
The Grass and the Bananago for a walk.

Date: Monday March 3rd, 2014
Time: 19.00 hr
Location: Piet Zwart Institute, Karel Doormanhof 45 Rotterdam

In MATERIALITIES, a lecture series organized by the artists enrolled in the Master of Fine Art program at the Piet Zwart Institute.

We are delighted to present Geoffrey Farmer’s lecture The Grass and the Bananago for a walk.

From Geoffrey Farmer:

“The banana arrives by boat. It rings like a phone and slips us up if we are not careful. The grass appears everywhere. It materializes the wind, grinds in the mill and enters into the gut of the Ungulates. The banana laughs, the grass coughs. The banana is a poet and the grass is a photographer. For my talk at Piet Zwart, I will meander through the material methodology of my knowledge. From learning to spell as a child by using bread dough, to growing perennial grasses and cutting out 17,000 images from LIFE magazine to make a work.”

Geoffrey Farmer (b. 1967, Vancouver, lives and works in Vancouver). At once fragile and multiform, discreet and omnipresent, Farmer’s work is the product of simple yet strategic manipulations. It operates on the same level as everyday experience: simultaneously rational and chaotic, undeniably concrete yet shaped by the imagination. In a voice that combines poetry and social commentary, his work conjures and reactivates a variety of narratives drawn from history, popular culture, art history and social environments. It also reflects an interest in the exhibition itself – both its fictional power and its temporal component. Farmer focuses on particular features of these diverse sources, notably concepts of the work and process, transformation and performance.
Geoffrey Farmer has a forthcoming retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2015 and his major installation Let’s Make the Water Turn Black was shown at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich and Nottingham Contemporary in 2013, opened at the Hamburg Kunstverein on March 1, and will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include The Grass and Banana Go for a Walk, Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2014); a new solo project for the fourth installment of Hybrid Naples (with Bettina Allamoda), Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples; A Light in the Moon, Mercer Union, Toronto(2013); The Surgeon and the Photographer, The Curve, Barbican Centre, London (2013); Mondegreen (with Jeremy Millar), Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2011); Casey Kaplan, New York (2011); REDCAT, Los Angeles (2011); Walter Philips Gallery, Banff (2010); Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City (2010); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2008). Recent group exhibitions includes The Intellection of Lady Spider House, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2013); Triennale der Kleinplastik, Stadt Fellbach (2013); dOCUMENTA (13) (2012); Stage Presence, SFMOMA, San Francisco (2012); Tools for Conviviality, Power Plant, Toronto The Garden of Forking Paths, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2011); Istanbul Biennial (2011). In 2013 Farmer was awarded the Gershon Iskowitz Prize.

Future speakers include: Mark Leckey, and more…