Jason Rhoades: PeaRoeFoam

(Hardback)

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Up to his untimely death in 2006 at 41, Jason Rhoades carried out a continuous assault on aesthetic conventions and the rules governing the art world - wryly subverting those very conditions by using them as materials for his work. In 2002, Rhoades introduced the world to his PeaRoeFoam, a 'brand new product and revolutionary new material' created from whole green peas, fish-bait style salmon eggs, and white virgin-beaded foam. When combined with non-toxic glue, they transform into a versatile, fast-drying, and ultimately hard material that he intended for both utilitarian as well as artistic uses - his detailed step-by-step instructions accompanied do-it-yourself kits complete with everything needed to make PeaRoeFoam. This seminal publication is the first to examine and situate the PeaRoeFoam project within Rhoades's career and to acknowledge its importance within the framework of his practice. Much like the exhibition it accompanies, which presents many of the individual components for the first time since their original installations, the book discusses and reproduces those initial presentations in depth, and includes an abundance of archival documents and photographs, installation views of all three shows, as well as the artist's diagrams and drawings related to their creation. The publication also features a personal and revealing essay by David Zwirner, who began showing Rhoades's work in the early 1990s, new scholarship by Julien Bismuth, and selected interviews from the Jason Rhoades Oral History project, conceived by Lucas Zwirner and Dylan Kenny, who have interviewed over fifty artists, curators, friends, collaborators, art historians, and others who intimately knew the artist - including curator and art historian Linda Norden.

Reviews

"His PeaRoeFoam project of 2002, reconstituted here, reads a bit like a last gasp of crashed-and-burned 'scatter art' of the late '90s (though Rhoades, as his drawings reveal, was a far more rigorous contrapuntist than his sloppier buddies). But it's also an economic and ecological collision course that feels wholly and disturbingly contemporary."--Jason Farago "ARTFORUM"
"The PeaRoeFoam project lends some clarity to the whole Rhoadesian enterprise while affirming his roles of impresario and inventor."--Karen Rosenberg "The New York Times"

Author Bio

Jason Rhoades was born in Newcastle, California in 1965. He received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1993. Later that year, Rhoades joined David Zwirner-becoming part of the gallery's original roster of artists-and had his first New York solo exhibition. Rhoades's work has been exhibited internationally since the 1990s. His first solo presentation at a European institution was held at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1996. Other international venues which have organized solo shows include the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Kunsthalle Nrnberg, Nuremberg, Germany (both 1998); Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany (1999); Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany (2000); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK), Vienna (2002); Le Magasin - Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France (2005); and the Centro de Arte Contemporneo de Mlaga, Spain (2006). In 2013, Jason Rhoades, Four Roads marked the first American museum exhibition of the artist's work, organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, which travels internationally through 2015 to the Kunsthalle Bremen in Germany and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England. Museum collections which hold works by the artist include the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum fr Gegenwart, Berlin; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Julien Bismuth is an artist and writer currently based in New York. He has published a number of texts, including a series of publications with Devonian Press, which he co-founded with the artist Jean-Pascal Flavien in 2005, as well as an essay for the catalogue Toba Khedoori, published on the occasion of her solo exhibition at David Zwirner in 2012.

David Zwirner opened his eponymous gallery in the SoHo neighborhood of New York in 1993. With locations currently in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong, the gallery represents around fifty artists and estates.

Lucas Zwirner is Head of Content at David Zwirner. He is known for creating the ekphrasis series, dedicated to publishing short texts on visual culture by artists and writers, rarely available in English. He has also written on numerous contemporary artists and translated books from German and French.

Dylan Kenny is a writer and researcher. He is currently a Paul Mellon Fellow at Cambridge University.

Linda Norden is an independent curator, writer, and art historian. Norden's writing has covered an extensive range of artists and critics, including Richard Artschwager, Robert Gober, Eva Hesse, Roni Horn, Pierre Huyghe, Lucy Lippard, Sharon Lockhart, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Ryman, and Cy Twombly.