William Rodney Graham (January 16, 1949 – October 22, 2022) was a Canadian visual artist and musician. He was closely associated with the Vancouver School. Early life Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, on January 16, 1949. He studied art history at the University of British Columbia and subsequently went to Simon Fraser University (SFU). He intended to concentrate on writing and literature before taking a modern art course taught by Ian Wallace at SFU. Work Coming out of Vancouver's 1970s photoconceptual tradition, Graham's work is often informed by historical literary, musical, philosophical, and popular references. He was most often associated with other west coast Canadian artists, including Vikky Alexander, Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, Roy Arden, and Ken Lum. During the late 1970s, he played electric guitar in the band UJ3RK5 with fellow visual artists Wall on keyboards and Ian Wallace on electric bass, among others. His wide-ranging and often genre-busting work frequently engaged with technologies of the past: literary, psychological, and musical texts, optical devices, and film as a historical medium. Among his earliest works is Camera Obscura (1979; destroyed 1981) a site-specific work that consisted of a shed-sized optical device on his family's farm field near Abbotsford, British Columbia. Entering the shed, the observer was confronted with an inverted image of a solitary tree. Both prior to this (with Rome Ruins [1978]) and throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Graham employed the technique of the camera obscura in his work. Beginning in the early 1980s, Graham took found texts as the basis for his bookworks – at once conceptual and material – inserting bookmarks with additional pages, inserting textual loops, or incorporating books into optical devices in works such as Dr. No* (1991), Lenz (1983), and Reading Machine for Lenz (1993) respectively. Many of these were carried out with the esteemed Belgian publisher Yves Gevaert and gallerist Christine Burgin. His extensive body of work related to Sigmund Freud (beginning in 1983) developed out of this text-based practice, though, later, found object books would be integrated unmodified into Donald Judd-like sculptures, for example The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (1987). Until 1997, when he represented Canada at the Venice Biennale with the film loop Vexation Island, Graham was most well known for his series of photographs of Welsh oaks seen upside-down. For this project, he employed a photographer to take black and white negatives of majestic, isolated trees in