[4] He uses a combination of a broad range of elements,[5] including: drawing, photography, video, sculpture, performance, found materials, and sometimes sound, bronze casting and waterworks.
Minimalism emphasized the artwork's ability to instill in the viewer a powerful sense of their own presence; Farmer's work begins with this idea of the art gallery as a site of phenomenological experience.
Postminimalism represents a refinement of minimalism in the way it emphasizes the role the gallery context plays in creating the meaning of an artwork.
Whereas minimalist artists, such as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, were said by art critic Michael Fried to theatricalize the gallery-going experience, Farmer uses the idioms of theatre and performance as analogies of the process of meaning.
"[7] According to Mark Clintberg writing in The Drawing Room, London for Canadian Art International Farmer's work The Last Two Million Years (2007), takes the ephemerality of time as its theme, making small delicate sculptures from the pages of an Encyclopedia.
[9] He followed this with many figurative works such as The Last Two Million Years (2007), The Idea and the Absence of the Idea (2008), The Surgeon and the Photographer (2009) (Vancouver Art Gallery), made of 365 three-dimensional collages, and Leaves of Grass (2012) (National Gallery of Canada), 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.
[13] In 2017, he also had a show titled The Care With Which The Rain Is Wrong, at the Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, Germany in which he used art monographs and his own digital library of illustrations and collection of sounds for his installations.