For his 15th show at the historic venue, Lisson Gallery exhibit a selection of arborous works by the late Canadian artist Rodney Graham. From camera-obscura works, to painting, conceptual sculpture and video, the multi-media exhibition captures a groundbreaking artist’s time in history as well as nature.

The main gallery of Lisson’s Bell Street location, which opens out like a church immediately after the reception, is neatly lined with photographic works from Graham’s Oxfordshire Oaks series. Blown up to several feet in height, the oak trees begin to take on the sublimity and vastness of their emanents, except for the unavoidable fact that they remain upside down. At what stage we can pinpoint Graham’s intervention into these images, whether at the point of exhibition or at the point of capture, is up for debate. What is certainly the case is that the grounding, vertical structure that not only defines the tree, but also what makes it a metaphor for grounding and structure in so many contexts, is subverted.

“He’s a sentimental silviculturalist,” writes Max Porter in his Lisson-commissioned book on the artist’s relationship with trees. “He’s well aware of what keeps him upside-down at night, ‘before the brain gets it right’”. In the inverted display of these trees, the branches and leaves begin to look like roots, splaying out in the sky/earth, under a grassy centrefold. We get a sense that, for Graham, the “shape” of a tree is not defined by a trunk base, growing upwards into greenery, but rather a baseless entity that grows in all directions, vertical and horizontal.

But what role does his camera take? Indeed, it is only through this apparatus—be it a traditional camera obscura, or in the chromogenic print titled Camera Obscura (1979), made with a shipping container-sized darkroom construction—that we see this ontological transformation. What’s more, the camera obscura phenomenon works on a horizontal plane, yet produces an image that allows us to ponder vertical structures. This play between planes is more comically iterated in the film work Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong, 1969 (2006), a staged Happening where the artist…well…lobs potatoes at a gong.

It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to suggest that Graham’s Oxfordshire Oaks are like the gong, marked by his artistic identity in their unnatural orientation. Looking at these blown-up images, we reify the fake audience in Lobbing. As is the case for many conceptual artists, these contemplations on interpretive frameworks open up many theoretical branches, many of which are also themed around trees—be it Jane Bennett or Deleuze and Guattari. But for Graham, the exhibition seems just to serve as a playful reminder of our connection to nature; how it exists after “the brain gets it right.” The chromogenic print Camera Obscura, for example, sits in front of a miniature remodel of the crate and tree on an artificial hillside, illustrating how the photo was taken. The gong from Lobbing is also included for our viewing pleasure, as are the potatoes in vodka form.

Oaks will exist before and after us; it is we who live in their world. Graham’s presentation, as well as the exhibition that surrounds it, is a conceptual bow of the head to their supremacy, a reminder that they cannot be captured, except in our cloistered minds. Graham’s commitment to this is quite a sight to behold.

Rodney Graham: Who does not love a tree? is on display at Lisson Gallery until 11th April 2026. To find out more, visit their website.

Featured Image: Rodney Graham Oak, Milcombe, 1990, Monochrome C-print, 183 x 231 cm, 72 x 91 in © Rodney Graham, Courtesy Lisson Gallery.