Vexation Island finds a pirate, played by the artist, on a deserted beach either sleeping under a palm tree or washed up following a shipwreck. This ambiguity remains over the course of the video. On waking, the character seems to look for sustenance before seeing a coconut on a tree, which he shakes only to be rendered unconscious again as it falls on his head.

The base humor Graham employs is a deliberate ploy, adopting generic tropes as conceptual languages and collapsing high and low culture. Yet it also defines a period which Graham’s practice frequently returned in the late 90s and early 2000s, and which carries associations to the adventure of literature and global capitalism which founded the modern world. This ‘closing the circle’ of trade and economics, and perhaps the trap that it created, is mirrored in the looping narratives of each work.