The Brant Foundation Art Study Center presents Jason Rhoades (1965-2006) an exhibition featuring a selection of works from The Brant Collection and other significant works from throughout his career. By bringing together iconic installations and rarely seen sculptures, this exhibition offers an insightful look at Rhoades's powerful and persuasive oeuvre.
Until his untimely death in 2006 at age 41, Rhoades carried out a continuous assault on aesthetic conventions and the rules governing the art world, wryly subverting those conditions by activating them within his practice. Underpinned by a unique combination of humor and conceptual rigor, his practice redefined and expanded the space in which artworks are both made and exhibited. With a firm belief in the ultimate freedom of expression for artists, Rhoades circumvented notions of taste and political correctness in a candid pursuit of the creative impulse itself.
A seminal early work created for the 1995 Whitney Biennial, My Brother/Brancuzi (1995) includes spare tires, gasoline engines, various tools, wooden crates, and an industrial donut machine in an intricate installation that at once references Rhoades's brother's suburban-style bedroom in California and Constantin Brancusi's Parisian studio. A self-conscious commentary on the significance of an artist's biographical background, the work also presents a nod to modernism-the crates double as pedestals while the donuts stand in for sculptures-and the use of the “readymade.”
Also on view in The Brant Foundation's Rhoades exhibition is The Grand Machine/THEAREOLA (2002), a major component of Rhoades's wider PeaRoeFoam project.