Robin Rhode: Through the Gate

About

Embracing a variety of media — principally photography, but also drawing, animation, performance and sculpture — the work of Robin Rhode uses simple, ephemeral devices (soap, charcoal, paint and chalk) to comment on urban youth culture, colonialism and socio-economic issues in a simple, witty and subtly effective way. His work often uses the street as his canvas or his backdrop, alluding to hip-hop and the role of the graffiti artist, and he often operates within the gritty aesthetic associated with that culture. Rhode's work, however transient it may seem, involves creating a kind of narrative that contains several stages of erasure and redrawing with the trace of his actions remaining visible throughout. There is also a pervasive mood of failure, while his persistent gestures toward ludicrous and apparently unachievable goals are as poignant as they are humorous. Rhode draws a skipping rope and cajoles a room of people to engage in a game of Double-Dutch with him, or he plays an upside-down game of snooker that only he can win — the challenger is absent and the game defies logic and gravity. For another work, Rhode fashioned a bike out of soap, rendering the object comically futile. While his work calls to mind early silent film, stop-start animation and flip books, Rhode's alter ego — a recurring feature — evokes a character from nineteenth and early twentieth-century American minstrel shows and the exploits of Buster Keaton. Rhode's practice straddles both the recent past, when one only needed a ball or a yo-yo in your pocket for amusement, and the constant, overwhelming stimuli of the present day.