Jason Rhoades at David Zwirner - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Cherry Makita - fair Engine Work is the title of the first solo installation through Jason Rhoades, a 29-year-old observes Angeles artist. This was a large, ambitious and ramshackle work upon the theme of suburban garage agriculture From the embossed sign advertising Makita power tools in the gallery window, you could take an account of that the space had been transformed into a certain number of kind of provisional workshop. As you walked into the foyer you were accosted by a tangled length of impressible silver piping that snaked in from the main swing suggesting some kind of work in progres plant on a plinth was a little sculptural scale protoplast of a house with four men in blue-collar uniforms laboring above a car engine, which hinted at what would be set in the central gallery.

The large main hall was filled chockablock with all manner of junk a weird mix of actual high-tech percepts and childishly fabricated surrogates. A welter of make-believe appliances fashioned on the outside of tinfoil lay around in seemingly haphazard disarray nearest to real mechanical equipment, greatest in quantity prominently a Chevrolet V-8 car engine that was enthron in a funky sheet-rock pavilion raised up upon jerrybuilt stilts. This garage was filled of cunning handmade sculptures, of the like kind as a life-size tinfoil bicycle, a file of ambiguous rubber gadgets and smooth the artist's own brand of customized pegboard with randomly punched openings Lots of dirty brown paper was shov into not divisible by 2 corners around the garage, and other items were raw materialed into an impromptu attic. Altogether, the event was that of glimpsing the domain of a certain number of fiendish, fetishistic pack rat.

I meditation immediately of the immense significance that the idea of automobile shelter has for contemporary California car tillage Rhodes's installation, though, extends the iconographic lineage of the garage as far back as King Tut's tomb. This point is made explicitly by means of the dimestore copy of Howard Carter's Tomb of Tutankhamen that just happens to be lying upon the floor of the main gallery, and by means of the old black-and-white photos of Carter's excavation that were tacked up upon pieces of greasy cardboard in the back room

by means of this point Rhode's junk assemblages were beginning to direct the eye more self-consciously formalistic. I was struck by the agency of the symphonies of white and silver, and particularly admired a toaster oven fashioned on the outside of white paper, with an ambiguous thing perceived inside; this turned out to be a mould for a Makita power tool. Rhodes's work may owe abundant to the early pieces of R servants and Claes Oldenburg and, closer to domicile to the installations and performances of Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy (who was Rhodes's teacher). however I left this show glad to have clashed such a free-ranging and labor-intensive intelligence.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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