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reviews sTEPHEN G. RHODEs
stephen G. rhodes: ruined dualisms
OvERDuiN aND KiTE, LOs aNGELEs
6 sEPTEm bER – 17 OcTObER
Ruined Dualisms, 2007 (installation
view). Photo: Joshua White. courtesy
Overduin and Kite, Los angeles
Two massive brick ruins stuffed with detritus face each other on either side of the gallery. Between them sit
double-sided video screens with makeshift frames. The mouth of a dented trombone rests on one of their
posts. Everything in Stephen G. Rhodes’s debut show at Overduin and Kite seems to riff on the idea of the
show’s title, Ruined Dualisms, from Manichaean pistol fights to the old struggle of labour versus capital, but
charged with the rotten dignity of an abandoned plantation house.
On each side of the screen a duel plays out, accompanied by spooky synthesised music, the repetitions
punctuated by the mournful wail of a sickly accordion. The duellists, like the country cousins of Samuel
Beckett’s pseudocouples, are paralysed by the shifting absurdity of the situation and the inexplicable acts that
befall them. They and their seconds are dressed in nineteenth-century period costumes with anachronistic
accessories; the pistols quite obviously plastic toys. And when the guns do not suddenly disappear from their
hands, they just as easily become walkie-talkies, or the accordion that provides the spectral wheeze on the
soundtrack. At their most serious, the duellists are beaned in the face with flour, or their taut grimaces become
broken with harmonicas stuffed between their lips.
The videos, both physically and conceptually, form the centre of the show, but they are surrounded by a
number of wall works that further extend the ‘ruined dualisms’ and contribute to the installation’s broken-down
beauty. On the walls are three different kinds of work: six Vacant Portraits (all works 2007), four resin-thick
collages with text and two photographed book covers. The Vacant Portraits, which have appeared in Rhodes’s
work before, face each other like the two ruined stacks of bricks. Placed in ornate, old-fashioned frames, the
paintings show ethereal coloured mists in vaguely human shapes on a black background. The ghosts look
almost capable of a shootout with the hyperrealistic guns that float at the bottom edge of the canvas.
Each made in the image of an oversize envelope, the four collages, all titled with variations of Post
Dualistic Bresson Notes (Blanchoted), hang interspersed between the Vacant Portraits. Each of the pieces
contains various texts from the notes of French film director Robert Bresson, along with a small picture of
Bresson and various cut-outs from popular magazines. The notes on the portraits can be crypto-poetic and
revealing, but not half as cryptic as the Maurice Blanchot words written on the back of the paper that bleed
through, unreadable – in some ways enacting Blanchot’s ideas about absence masked by the word as absence.
The conversation – or duel – between them has been rendered unintelligible to us.
All these allusive duels and dualisms collapse for one reason or another, Rhodes intentionally breaking
down the show’s symmetry. Using video, sculpture, painting and collage, Rhodes’s work contains a complex
iconography. And though he still has some ways to go in realising his intellectual ambition, this solo show
establishes him as a serious artist worthy of profound consideration. Andrew Berardini
artreview 204
November_REVIEWS.indd 204 26/9/07 13:44:09
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