Jason Rhoades, 41, Maker of Transgressive Installations (NY Times)
Hyfler/Rosner
NY Times
Ken Johnson
Jason Rhoades, 41, Maker of Transgressive Installations, Is Dead
http://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/5/
http://www.artbrain.org/gallery3/rhoades.html
(there's lots more on the web)
Jason Rhoades, the Los Angeles sculptor who garnered international
renown for his audacious, wildly diversified, morally provocative
installations, died suddenly on Tuesday after being taken ill at his
home. He was 41.
The cause was heart failure, said Mr. Rhoades's New York gallerist,
David Zwirner. Mr. Rhoades was pronounced dead at Cedars-Sinai Medical
Center.
Mr. Rhoades emerged professionally in the early 1990's, when artists
like Matthew Barney and Cady Noland were also creating symbolically
charged environments out of unlikely commercial and industrial
products. Mr. Rhoades's work was distinguished for being at once
messily absurd and obscurely systematic. A sprawling yet tightly
organized installation for the 1995 Whitney Biennial called "My
Brother/Brancusi" included a donut-making machine and automotive
repair equipment, along with photographs of Brancusi's studio and of
Mr. Rhoades's brother's bedroom, from which the installation's
layout was derived.
Cheerfully vulgar sexual references were always a part of Mr.
Rhoades's work, reflecting, perhaps, his studies with the famously
ribald artist Paul McCarthy at the University of California, Los
Angeles, in the early 1990's. An exhibition called "Meccatuna" at
the David Zwirner gallery in 2003 featured hundreds of neon signs
spelling slangy euphemisms for female genitalia. It also had a
one-third-size model of the Kaaba, the stone structure in Mecca
venerated by followers of Islam, that a gallery assistant was
constructing from Lego blocks during the run of the show. Such
divergent representations could be bewildering, but underlying all Mr.
Rhoades's projects was a conviction that everything is somehow
connected, albeit not always in obvious ways.
A key figure in the Los Angeles art world, Mr. Rhoades was also warmly
embraced in Europe, where artists like Joseph Beuys and Dieter Roth had
accustomed audiences to grandiose theatrical spectacles. At the
Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany, in 1999, he constructed what he
then maintained was the world's largest sculpture, a vast platform
bearing an actual-size photographic replica of his father's garden
raised high overhead on a complex system of polished aluminum
scaffolding.
For his most recent project last winter in Los Angeles, Mr. Rhoades
conducted a series of invitation-only, Thursday-night soirées at which
guests were entertained by musical acts and invited to participate in
zany activities like macramé weaving and eating frozen yogurt out of
their shoes.
Jason Fayette Rhoades was born in the northern California town of
Newcastle on July 9, 1965. He attended the California College of Arts
and Crafts in Oakland and the San Francisco Art Institute, and he
earned a master's of fine arts degree from the University of
California, Los Angeles, in 1993. That year he had his first solo
exhibition at Mr. Zwirner's gallery in New York. A large installation
by Mr. Rhoades titled "Tijuanatanjierchandelier" is on view at the
Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain, through Oct. 29.
Mr. Rhoades is survived by his wife, the artist Rachel Khedoori, and
his daughter, Rubi; his parents, Jack and Jackie Rhoades; and his
brothers, Greg and Matt Rhoades.
"To juggle the impossible was always an issue throughout my work,"
Mr. Rhoades once said. "To take three objects, like a rubber ball, a
chain saw and a live African elephant and try to juggle."