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Jason Rhoades
Mi Saga, U Saga (Emmanuelle Saga), 2005

Installation view: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Collection as Aleph, Kunsthaus Graz, 2008, Photo: Niki Lackner / Landesmuseum Joanneum

Jason Rhoades

Collection

Installation with several neon phrases, two chandeliers, polished aluminum tubes, concrete, clamps, speakers, Wailing Wall (plastic, metal table; Camel Toe Bone; PeaRoeFoam; neon; Plexiglas; electrical wiring), and the publication "1724 Birth of the cunt"
360 x 370 x 420 cm

Californian artist Jason Rhoades’ Mi Saga, U Saga (Emmanuelle Saga) is a characteristically bewildering assemblage of objects – the enlarged fibreglass cast of a petrified camel’s toe bone found in Florida and purchased by the artist on eBay, glowing neon phrases tumbling from improvised chandeliers above a Recession-era bench, and a trademark Meccavulva (an aluminum cast designed in the shape of the mount that holds the Black Stone to a corner of the Kaaba shrine at Mecca) – arranged in seemingly arbitrary fashion, framed within a haphazard structure of metal piping, and dedicated to the cult heroine of 1970s soft-core pornographic films. It is a dark, comic and knowingly perverse commentary on sex, money, religion, crudely blended into a quietly inflammatory whole, and a provocative critique of the often conservative yardsticks by which all art, high and low, is traditionally judged. Mi Saga, U Saga (Emmanuelle Saga) can also be read as a critique of the forms of high art. Rhoades executes transformations and ideological investigations of objects. What might appear to be the giant, unstructured realm of a manic collector, is revealed to possess an order that is not completely transparent, but still seems to follow a system. The swelling accumulation of consumer goods and information materials that reaches monumental proportions becomes the content of the work. With his installation, Rhoades tries to express the idea that the artist a consuming and processing subject. Everything becomes the raw material of the art: plastic buckets, monitors, gadgets, machines, tables, rolls of cable, neon letters and sounds.
– Jasper Sharp

Jason Rhoades (1965 – 2006) is known for monumental, room-filling installations. These idiosyncratic sculptures incorporate a wide range of objects including products of mass culture combined with hand-made items and biographical references. Drawing on the history of assemblage, Rhoades imbues his materials with powerful formal, narrative and allegorical links, encouraging viewers to connect and interpret the associative chains. Rhoades often drew inspiration from the city of Los Angeles where he lived and worked as well as The Great American West, informed by his rural upbringing in Northern California. His work has been exhibited internationally since the early 1990s.

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RELATED PROGRAM

Puppets and Heavenly Creatures
June 4–September 9, 2005 |TBA21, Vienna

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Collection as Aleph | March 6–October 26, 2008 | Kunsthaus Graz

Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary – The Collection Book
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2009

Artists

Jason Rhoades

Jason RhoadesMi Saga, U Saga (Emmanuelle Saga), 2005

Jason Rhoades
Mi Saga, U Saga (Emmanuelle Saga), 2005