As both an artist and a model, he created alternative worlds where ordinary characters seemed extraordinary.
Rodney Graham, a critically acclaimed Canadian artist who was known internationally for his evocative and slyly humorous large-scale photographs and short films starring himself that celebrated the banality of everyday life at its most radiant, died in Vancouver on Oct. 22. He was 73.
The cause was cancer, according to a joint statement by five galleries that represented him in the United States and Europe.
Mr. Graham emerged in the 1970s as an artist aligned with the so-called Vancouver School of photoconceptualists, along with the artists Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Roy Arden, Stan Douglas and others.
He is perhaps best known for his majestic lightbox photographs and triptychs conjuring richly imagined worlds in which he posed as obscure, yet oddly familiar archetypes: a hip film-studies professor from the 1970s, complete with mod clothing; a weary chef smoking a cigarette after a grueling shift; an aging hippie hermit leaping for joy in front of his cottage, seemingly oblivious to the concerns of the world.
Both the sets and costumes he put together for such photos seemed Hollywood-worthy. For one signature work, “Basement Camera Shop circa 1937,” from 2011, he reconstructed a Depression-era photo lab inspired by an old photograph he had found in an antiques store and cast himself as its silver-haired proprietor, in a cardigan sweater and bow tie, dutifully doing paperwork.
His breakout came when he was named the Canadian representative to the 1997 Venice Biennale, for which he produced a video installation called Vexation Island. Mr. Graham converted the Canadian pavilion into a wooden-walled space suggesting a Robinson Crusoe-style castaway hut. Inside, a Technicolor-rich film loop played, showing the artist in the garb of a pirate who appears to be napping blissfully on the sunbaked sands of a desert isle.
But as the loop rolls on, it becomes clear that the stranded seafarer is stuck in a Sisyphean struggle: shaking a tree for a coconut, getting knocked out when the coconut strikes him on the head, then lying unconscious on the sand until the whole episode begins again. “Infuriatingly hilarious,” the critic Dan Cameron wrote in an Artforum review.
Mr. Graham was never afraid to confound while enlightening. He was a polymath with an insatiable curiosity who drew from a deep reservoir of knowledge in history, philosophy, literature and popular culture. His work percolated with knowing references to notables as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Marcel Duchamp, Black Sabbath, Edgar Allan Poe and Judy Garland.
“You could literally ask him about anything,” Lisa Spellman, who represented Mr. Graham for three decades through the 303 Gallery in New York, said in a phone interview. “He would laugh if we called him a ‘Renaissance man,’ because it’s such a cliché, but he really was. He was like a punk rock Renaissance man.”
Whatever the medium, Mr. Graham seemed more interested in exploding genres than fitting into them, making forays into painting, performance art, sculpture and music in his half-century career.
In the late 1970s, he formed a conceptual post-punk band called UJ3RK5 (pronounced “you jerks”), which included Mr. Wallace and Mr. Wall. In 1980, they released an EP, “Eisenhower and the Hippies,” and once opened for the British new wave band Gang of Four. Mr. Graham, a singer-songwriter, also recorded and performed his own genre-blending pop songs with the Rodney Graham Band and created soundtracks to accompany his artwork.
His musical exploration was “more than an integral part of the work,” Kim Gordon, the Sonic Youth member and visual artist, wrote in Bomb magazine in 2004. “It has an equal weight to the visual components as subject matter.”
In his photographic work, Mr. Graham went to no end to recreate telling, and almost laughably specific, moments in the lives of his characters. To create a set for his roughly 18-by-9-foot lightbox triptych “The Gifted Amateur, Nov. 10th, 1962,” from 2007, he spent months scouring thrift shops and antiques stores to transform a school gymnasium in Vancouver into a sleek Neutra-style bachelor pad from the Kennedy era.
The work, a loving if wry examination of an art lover’s passion and pretensions, featured Mr. Graham as a divorced middle-aged professional in bare feet and expensive pajamas trying his hand at painting in his newspaper-covered living room after a trip to New York, where he had been inspired by an exhibition by the Abstract Expressionist Morris Louis.
“When I’m creating a lightbox, with a character it’s not really a method approach, it’s not part of a rich fantasy life of mine,” Mr. Graham said in a recent interview for Lisson Gallery in New York, another that represented him. “I want to do just enough to make the character plausible, but I don’t create an elaborate back story.”
Critics tended to be intrigued by his characters. “There’s a roguish charm to Rodney Graham’s art, but it is ultimately aloof, as if intended to entertain a party of one, namely himself,” Roberta Smith of The New York Times wrote in a review. “The rest of us can certainly watch if we choose to, but it’s not required.”
For many art lovers, the choice was obvious, if only for the continuous allure of the unexpected. Mr. Graham’s first video, “Halcion Sleep” (1994), portrayed him in the back seat of a van in striped pajamas resting after an implied heavy dose of the drug in the title as the vehicle cruised through rain-soaked streets at night.
In 2001, he again tapped the pharmaceutical realm for his film installation “Phonokinetoscope.” Dropping a tab of LSD, Mr. Graham took off on a vintage-style bicycle for a rambling journey through Berlin’s lush Tiergarten park in a homage to the famous 1943 bicycle ride that Albert Hofmann, the chemist who discovered LSD, took through Basel, Switzerland, after ingesting his first intentional dose of the drug.
Mr. Graham was a “Buster Keaton of Conceptualism,” Barry Schwabsky once wrote in Artforum.
Mr. Graham said he reveled in acting both as artist and subject. “I always say it’s like Tom Cruise,” he was quoted as saying of his work in a 2014 interview with The Globe & Mail, the Canadian newspaper. “I’m the actor/executive producer.”
William Rodney Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, on Jan. 16, 1949, to Richard and Janet (Golos) Graham. His father was a purchasing agent for a lumber company, and his mother was a school librarian.
During his youth, he entertained thoughts of becoming an artist or writer, and at 19 enrolled in the University of British Columbia to study art history. He later moved to Simon Fraser University, where he studied under Mr. Wallace, who became his bandmate.
For a time, he entertained a career in music. But art soon took precedence.
Mr. Graham is survived by his mother; a sister, Lindsay; a brother, Alan; and his partner, Jill Orsten. A group he considered his adopted family, including his friends Shannon Oksanen and Scott Livingstone and their children Ray and Coco Livingstone, were present at his death.
In an early notable work, “Camera Obscura,” in 1979, Mr. Graham recreated the archaic optical device in the title by building a huge shed on his family farm in Abbotsford, with a pinhole lens in one wall that was trained on an individual tree in a landscape. When the room was dark, the lens projected an image of the tree on the opposite wall, but upside down.
The technology inspired a series of such black-and-white photographs — a meditation on the interplay between eye and mind and perhaps on mortality.
The photos “have an abstract side that allows one to see them as totems or phalluses, and they have particular identities as noble survivors in a topsy-turvy natural world,” Andy Grundberg wrote in a review in The Times in 1990. “At a time when the conventions of landscape photography seem exhausted and inadequate, Mr. Graham revivifies the genre by standing it on its head.”
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