12 Facts About Geoffrey Farmer

Geoffrey Farmer was born on 1967 and is best known for extensive multimedia installations made of cut-out images which form collages.

Geoffrey Farmer received his art training at the San Francisco Art Institute and Emily Carr University.

Geoffrey Farmer creates installation-based artworks to create intersections of personal and lived experiences.

Geoffrey Farmer uses a combination of a broad range of elements, including: drawing, photography, video, sculpture, performance, found materials, and sometimes sound, bronze casting and waterworks.

Geoffrey Farmer's work offers a subtle take on the legacies of minimalist and postminimalist art.

Minimalism emphasized the artwork's ability to instill in the viewer a powerful sense of their own presence; Geoffrey Farmer's work begins with this idea of the art gallery as a site of phenomenological experience.

Geoffrey Farmer adds to both traditions by focusing on the nature of meaning itself, emphasizing its fragility.

Whereas minimalist artists, such as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, were said by art critic Michael Fried to theatricalize the gallery-going experience, Geoffrey Farmer uses the idioms of theatre and performance as analogies of the process of meaning.

Geoffrey Farmer creates the art exhibition as a set of components made available for the viewer's interpretation.

Geoffrey Farmer followed this with many figurative works such as The Last Two Million Years, The Idea and the Absence of the Idea, The Surgeon and the Photographer, made of 365 three-dimensional collages, and Leaves of Grass, an installation 124 feet long, of more than 15,000 images cut from 50 years of Life magazine, arranged chronologically on stalks of dried grass.

Geoffrey Farmer viewed The Surgeon and the Photographer, along with The Last Two Million Years and Leaves of Grass as a trilogy of installations, based on the accumulation of images.

For dOCUMENTA in 2012, Geoffrey Farmer produced Leaves of Grass.