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b. 1965, Newcastle, California, USA
There is a sense, looking at the chaotic installations of the American artist Jason Rhoades, that they're incomplete assemblies of things found by chance. His 2003 Meccatuna, an installation which includes a rendering in pieces of Lego of Ka'ba, the sacred Islamic shrine at Mecca, several fibreglass donkeys, a Honda 2003 XR50, a selection of neon signs, tins of tuna from Mecca, enlarged camel toe bones and sundry other objects of varying symbolic significance. A female assistant built the centrally placed Ka'ba during exhibition opening hours from one million pieces of Lego. By transforming the holiest of Islamic religious sites into a gigantic toy, the artist is highlighting divisions between Islamic and American culture. While Muslims face towards the sacred shrine at Mecca when they pray, Rhoades points towards the holiest of American shrines, the mall.
The 2003 sculpture The World with Unpainted Donkey was a part of the Meccatuna installation. A primitive planet made of used packaging is placed on a plastic barrel. Standing alongside this constellation is a white plastic donkey and an illuminated neon sign stand. The sculpture has no obvious narrative logic. The donkey, which turns up in several places in Meccatuna, could possibly be seen as a self-biographical touch since Rhoades's mother bred miniature Sicilian donkeys during his childhood. Rhoades has attached a transformer label in Arabic characters to the back of the donkey. The black label with the gold letters could be conceived as an ironic comment on US–Arab relations. The neon sign is a well-known element of American consumer culture, but in Meccatuna, rows of illuminated words are also redolent of the Arabic characters which adorn the Ka'ba and other sacred buildings in the Muslim world. One of the most striking elements of the sculpture is the originally developed material PeaRoeFoam. The substance, a concoction of dried green peas, red salmon roe and small white polystyrene pellets produces, when mixed with environmentally friendly glue, a strong, quick-drying building material with numerous uses. The artists arrived at this adhesive matter after some experimentation, and it's use here is to glue recycled packaging together. PeaRoeFoam could be read as a brand, a symbol of the creative process encapsulated in organic matter like peas and roe.
Because Jason Rhoades likes to keep an open mind to the completed work, and it is therefore important never to finish a work but let it retain a fragmented nature and the various elements their original functions and raisons d'êtres. This is the only way a work can still seem like a developing idea, allowing each separate element to set off a multitude of interpretative angles. The basic thing as far as the artist is concerned is process and functionality. The convoluted visual language could hark back to the older artist Paul McCarthy (b 1945), who collaborated with Rhoades on several installations (among them the 1999 Propposition). Another artist of importance to Rhoades is the German Dieter Roth (1930–98). Roth wanted to capture perpetual motion in his many installations. Jason Rhoades has evolved an original and distinctive idiom where issues related to politics and identity are addressed in innovational work with a clear attachment to American culture and consumer society's ready-to-use aesthetic.
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