In the work of Rodney Graham, human estrangement from nature is of paramount concern. Despite attempts to bridge the rift between the two spheres, Graham's vision always ends with some sort of abyss continuing to divide them. Working with photography, film, and book art, he spins classic narratives with a contemporary Freudian twist, often featuring neurotic heroes who are doomed to a Sisyphean existence of endless repetition. Such a figure, played by the artist, is at the center of Vexation Island (1997), in which an eighteenth-century sailor is marooned on an archetypally lush, paradisiacal desert island. The sailor lies unconscious on an empty beach, eventually rising to shake a coconut from a nearby tree; the coconut falls on his head, thus returning him to his unconscious state, and the cycle repeats. Created for the Canadian Pavilion of the 1997 Venice Biennale, this film is presented in the vivid Technicolor and wide-screen Cinemascope of a Hollywood film or advertisement for a Caribbean getaway cruise. Incredibly pleasurable to savor, it is nonetheless a study in frustrated storytelling as its continual loop denies the viewer the gratification of a narrative that progresses. In Graham's desert-island adventure, nature always triumphs over the vain struggles of man.
