Geoffrey Farmer (b. 1967, Vancouver) is best known for his installations and large-scale, sculptural photo collages. This immersive survey of the artist’s recent major “paper works” presents room-sized installations composed of hundreds of small sculptures made of cutout photographs, fabric, and various supports. In these recent works, processions of figures assembled from fragments of book and magazine photography and illustration manifest the artist’s interest in the cross-pollination of historical and vernacular imagery.
Each spectacular composition begins to chart the historical contours of our image-saturated contemporary culture, and suggest the recurring cultural themes and formal patterns. Farmer uses movement, sound, animation, puppet characters, and a panoply of highly choreographed bodies and characters to investigate world history from the different angles of its photographic and sculptural accounts.
Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website