Stephen G. Rhodes

The installations of American artist Stephen G. Rhodes (born 1977 in Houston, lives and works in New Orleans and Berlin), which are distinguished by the combination of diverse media, are based on selected references from a wide range of historical and cultural sources, including the American past and the histories of art and film, which he fuses into a new and dense semantic system. In the cycle of works Rhodes presented in 2009 under the title “Dar Allers war ne'er eny Bear Bear” at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery, for example, he linked Walt Disney's “Song of the South” (1946), a movie adaptation of Joel Chandler Harris's “Uncle Remus” stories, which are in turn based on the oral histories of the slaves on the plantations of the American South, to Stanley Kubrick's “The Shining” (1980). Building such connections allows him to take up the repressed depths of the American past and place them in new contexts.