This February, BALTIC in Gateshead plays host to the first ever UK retrospective of the celebrated American installation artist Jason Rhoades.
With cultural references ranging from the likes of Donald Judd, Duchamp, Ayrton Senna and Kevin Costner, to the classic 70s movie Car Wash, Jason Rhoades's sprawling installation pieces are created with a myriad of different materials both found and sourced, including Lego, neon and power tools.
Rhoades lived and worked in Los Angeles until his death in 2006, aged forty-one. He claimed to have built the world’s largest sculpture at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany in 1999 and his work was featured in the 52nd Venice Biennale. Many of his pieces had an interactive element, his Black Pussy Soiree Cabaret Macrame (2006), combined an exhibition with a dinner party and featured neon signs with African, Caribbean, Creole and hip-hop slang words commonly used for female genitalia.
Rhoades's pieces are engaging and accessible, but on closer inspection, his seemingly random collections of objects bely a deeper meaning. Everything – which in the case of his piece Creation includesfolding banquet tables, buckets, shredded paper, wooden logs, office equipment and furniture, video monitors and a smoke machine – is there for a reason.
There's a rare chance to experience Rhoades's epic pieces for yourself in February, when the BALTIC in Gateshead will host the first major exhibition of his work in the UK. Its title Four Roads references the
four major installations from across the artist’s career which are featured: Garage Renovation New York (Cherry Makita), 1993; The Creation Myth, 1998; Sutter’s Mill, 2000; and Untitled (from My Madinah: In pursuit of my ermitage...), 2004/2013.
Four Roads
20 February–31 May 2015
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
Gateshead Quays
South Shore Road, Gateshead
NE8 3BA UK Photographs taken at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania Courtesy Aaron Igler/Greenhouse Media