This video suggests a collusion between the speed of real time and the slowness proper to a state of absence. It shows the artist sitting in the backseat of a car, unconscious after absorbing a double dose of the sedative Halcion. This state of absence, a sort of suspension of time, is in striking contrast with the background, formed of images of the city rolling by seen through the car’s back and side windows. This real-time activity shows the trajectory between a motel near Vancouver (the Coquitlam Sleepy Lodge), where the artist swallowed the drug, and his downtown studio. The video stages a childhood memory in which he returned to the family home asleep and comfortably sitting on the backseat of the car after a day out with the family. The sleeper seems now, thirty years later, older and fatter, such that an uncomfortable sensation is produced in this second collusion between the present and the past. This is even truer because the effect of this typical 1990s psycholeptic blocks dreams, suddenly knocks its consumer unconscious, and erases from his memory all events that led to his taking it. This strange initiatory journey that begins as a reminiscence appeals, on the contrary, to a suspended memory. It is quite an ironic nostalgic fable.

Born in 1949, Rodney Graham studied art history at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where he lives and works. In the early 1980s, he was active in exhibitions in North America and Europe, including Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992 and the Venice Biennale the following year, where he represented Canada. In 1999, he had an important exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Vienna. Known mainly for his performances and conceptual films, Graham has elaborated a body of work that is intellectually rigorous and touches the entire field of artistic creativity, including music and writing.