Steve Roden: when words become forms
Steve Roden, who lives and works in Pasadena, California, has been creating paintings, drawings, sculpture, film, and sound works for nearly two decades. He has created an unusually distinctive body of work that is marked not only by an originality of vision, but also by a resolute independence. Roden’s reputation as a visual artist has grown steadily over the last decade, and his reputation as a sound artist is stellar. So it is surprising that an artist of his magnitude and seriousness, who is capable of such beautifully eccentric work, is still working humbly below the radar.
In part to address this oversight and to accord his work the attention it deserves, the Pomona College Museum of Art is pleased to present Roden’s most ambitious work to date. One can trace the origins of this current project back to his exhibition in 2003, Project Series 17: Steve Roden the another silent green world. For this highly acclaimed exhibition at the Pomona College Museum of Art, Roden presented new work—including paintings, photographs, sculptures, and a site-specific audio piece—that used conceptual and intuitive frameworks to translate obscure systems of literary reference into visual designs.
Then, in early 2007, Roden visited the Pomona College Museum of Art to view the exhibition hunches, geometrics, organics: paintings by Frederick Hammersley. I learned how much Roden admired Hammersley, and was able to connect the two for a brief but memorable telephone conversation. Later in 2007, Roden accompanied me on a visit to Pomona College’s newly inaugurated James Turrell Skyspace, Dividing the Light. Roden completed an audio piece in Seattle for the Henry Art Gallery’s Skyspace by Turrell in 2006, and he was eager to see another one. We began to talk about working together again; over the next year, our plans solidified. I knew the Museum lacked the space to host the survey exhibition his work deserved. I also was aware that Roden had begun fabricating large-scale, site-specific installations that merged sculpture and sound with architecture.
I invited Roden to continue his explorations in expanding the dialogue between sculpture and architecture at Pomona. The result, Steve Roden: when words become forms, represents a significant shift in his practice since his last project at Pomona. Instead of presenting a diverse body of work from various sources, when words become forms reflects Roden’s current interest in creating large architectural environments derived from or inspired by a single source, which creates a deeper relationship between objects in different mediums.
The title of the exhibition references Roden’s long-term interests in translation and chance. For his “translations,” Roden literally fractures words and images into pieces and transforms them from the letters on the printed page into “scores” that direct certain actions towards the making of the work. Instead of simply recreating source material, he aims to explore it more fully, often going beyond its intended meanings.
Roden is also interested in illegibility, and with this new project he returned to an image that has intrigued him for several years. The title of the installation, bowrain, is an anagram of the word “rainbow.” bowrain was inspired by a small notational drawing made by Buckminster Fuller in the early 1950s. Roden found the drawing in the book Buckminster Fuller: Your Private Sky, and immediately noticed that it was the only caption-less image. The Fuller drawing indicated a kit, with listings for six numbers, six units, and six colors (the colors of the rainbow), for a structure of some kind.
Roden essentially used Fuller’s unusual drawing as a road map or a score to determine the components of the structure. For example, Roden took the six colors in Fuller’s drawing and transposed them to six different kinds of wood, the varying lengths of which were also determined by Fuller’s colors. Roden collaborated with Museum preparator Gary Murphy on choosing the wood, and Murphy fabricated the units of wood to the specifications he and Roden generated from Fuller’s notes. To build the work, the six variables of wood type and length were noted upon six small slips of paper, which were then drawn randomly from an empty can until all 490 pieces of wood had been placed. While Roden determined the type of units and their order by chance, he built the installation intuitively, making architectural, sculptural, and aesthetic decisions in negotiation with Fuller’s drawing. The units and colors in three films projected on the sculpture also take their cues from Fuller’s drawing. In addition, an audio work was created for the installation using six found ceramic bowls—each a color of Fuller’s rainbow—to generate sounds and tones.
In addition to bowrain, the exhibition contains a series of new paintings that are inspired by an equally unusual source: a group of postcards that Frederick Hammersley gave to me in 2003. When Roden saw these postcards, they immediately intrigued him as objects collected by an artist whom he admired who also happened to be a fellow collector. The postcards became the focal point of a collaboration between Roden and Holte in which each created a new body of work: Roden produced the smallest paintings he has ever made and Michael Ned Holte wrote a series of prose poems.
This exhibition and catalog reflect the collaborative nature of Roden’s work. His willingness to engage with other artists, writers, musicians, fabricators, and designers allows his work to enter a realm where the unexpected and unknown not only happen, but lead to unforeseen beauty and visionary possibilities. Very few artists, past or present, are willing to take the risks Roden does and to push their practices into challenging, often uncomfortable, terrain. Perhaps this openness, and yes, humbleness, in Roden’s work is why his profoundly engaging and creative practice resides contentedly in a world of its own.
August 31 – December 18, 2010 at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College
Artist
Curator
Rebecca McGrew
Senior Curator
Supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts' program, Challenge America: Reaching Every Community
Related Links and Reviews
In the News
LA Times Review by Holly Myers
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