Who is Geoffrey Farmer?

Geoffrey Farmer is a Canadian artist, based in Vancouver. His career as an artist was not planned, he simply attended an art class with his sister when he was 21 and that was that.

Farmer’s work is multi-media, using collage, photography, drawing, sculpture, video and many found materials to create complex pieces which can contain sound or mechanical elements to bring them to life.

Farmer is known to drastically edit and rearrange his pieces according to the space in which they are installed. Curator Jessica Morgan jokingly labelled him the ‘enemy of the museum’ because of his tendency to change a piece throughout an exhibition.

The Last Two Million Years is a piece inspired by a found encyclopaedia of the same name. Farmer was impressed by the book’s’ bold attempt to encapsulate the entire history of the world.

Using its pages, Farmer created his own paper sculptures, including some of vikings and Queen Elizabeth, randomly assorted on plinths. The passing of time is disregarded, so we have to readjust our chronological thinking and see all of existence, amassed in front of us. The titles accompany the piece in a small booklet and many are extracts from the original encyclopaedia. The Gandhi cut-out is accompanied by the extract:  

Farmer’s ever-evolving work Let’s Make the Water Turn Black is a tribute to Frank Zappa’s 1968 composition. Farmer uses elements of sound from Zappa’s entire career, including clips of popular songs, radio broadcasts, musical instruments and other sound effects. The piece itself becomes the instrument; with over 70 bizarre abstract objects, salvaged movie props and assorted materials, animated by a computer to produce noises or set things a-jingling. The theatrical lights continuously change, altering the atmosphere of the room. Farmer’s collage aesthetic mimics that of Zappa’s music, so that the sense of time passing as the piece continuously moves and evolves mirrors the literal recording of time passing as Zappa’s life is played out in the listener’s ears.

Another of Farmer’s pieces was named after Walt Whitman’s life-long project, the poetry book Leaves of Grass. Whitman would often cut up his writing to create the poems, which were to be a portrait of the United States. Farmer, similarly uses collage to create a portrait of mankind. The work is an epic, sculptural photomontage; 16,000 figures made from 900 issues of Life Magazine spanning from 1935 to 1985, chronologically ordered and mounted onto dried grass sticks: