Hammer Projects: Stephen G. Rhodes
Hammer Museum – Los Angeles, CA
6/19/10 to 9/26/10

Los Angeles–based artist Stephen G. Rhodes’s multimedia installations darkly theatricalize the historical unconscious, borrowing strategies of pedagogical entertainment found in theme parks, period cinema, and museum displays. When Rhodes takes on a topic, he literally tackles it, ungluing the various parts (overt or subliminal) to reveal the underbelly of his subject.

For his first museum solo exhibition, Rhodes debuts an installation that takes as its starting point the TV pioneer Steve Allen’s late 1970s television chat show Meeting of Minds — a pre-Bill and Ted’s anachronistic talk show featuring guests from different historical periods where one may find Frederick Douglass and the Marquis de Sade sharing laughs at a roundtable discussion with Niccolò Machiavelli and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The installation on view at the Hammer, Receding Mind: Circle of Shit (2010) (consisting of the destroyed film set and a 360-degree projection), stages a collision of mediums, citations, and narrative contingencies, offering an impossible history lesson that must be negotiated both architecturally and cinematically.

Stephen G. Rhodes was born in Houston, Texas in 1977, raised in Louisiana, and currently lives in Los Angeles. He received a BFA from Bard College, Annandale, NY (1999), and a MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA (2005). Rhodes has exhibited widely in the U.S. and Europe and was included in Prospect 1 biennial, New Orleans, LA; The Generational: Younger than Jesus, the New Museum, New York, NY; and Between Two Deaths, ZKM Center for the Arts and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany. He was also featured in Second Nature: The Valentine-Adelson Collection at the Hammer Museum (2009). Hammer Projects: Stephen G. Rhodes is his first one-person museum exhibition.

This exhibition is organized by Ali Subotnick, Hammer curator.

Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90024

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Via Hammer Museum