Jason Rhoades. Tijuanatanjierchandelier

About

First installed at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Málaga, Spain, in 2006, and then featured the following year at the 52nd Venice Biennale, this exhibition marks the first presentation of Tijuanatanjierchandelier in New York. This significant work—one of several installations made during the latter part of the artist’s career—exemplifies Rhoades’s singular investigation of contemporary consumer culture, his career-long interest in probing both language and identity, and his ceaseless drive to push the limits of convention.

Rhoades emerged in the 1990s as one of the most formally and conceptually rigorous artists of his time. During his short but prolific career he became known for highly original, large-scale sculptural installations, which incorporate various materials inspired by Los Angeles car culture and his upbringing in rural Northern California, as well as by a mixture of historical and contemporary global and regional influences that he explored throughout his life. Until his untimely death, in 2006 at age 41, Rhoades carried out a continual assault on aesthetic conventions and the rules governing the art world, wryly subverting those conditions by integrating them into his practice. He conceived his works as part of an ongoing project, to which objects were continuously added, assembled, and reassembled in various configurations. As Rhoades’s friend, fellow artist and writer Julien Bismuth, notes: “When Jason tackles a cultural topic, he does it in a deliberately dispersed and multi-perspectival way. He culls viewpoints, references, lingos, incidents, objects, [and] trends, and recomposes them to produce his complex and intricate installations. He doesn’t present arguments or judgements on a situation; he shows its landscape and the plurality of voices—major and minor—that occupy it.” Through his unique visual aesthetic and the conceptual depth of his work, Rhoades complicated the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the physical and the immaterial, challenging social, political, and linguistic structures and revealing the complexities and contradictions of our globalized, interconnected era.