The myth, as much as the actuality, of the West—the frontier—has intermittently engaged veteran American artist Bruce Nauman and his younger Canadian counterpart Rodney Graham. The deadpan, disarmingly irreverent, or nonchalant tone of their works acknowledges the inescapable filtering of this tenacious thematic, first enshrined in cinema and later in music, through a haze of decades of relentless appropriation by high and low culture alike. ". . . the nearest faraway place . . ." assembles new and earlier works that reflect the artists’ shared interest in this subject so seminal to the North American imaginary.

Rodney Graham was born in Abbotsford, Canada, in 1949. He lives and works in Vancouver.

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Bruce Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1941. He lives in Northern New Mexico.

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