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Steve Roden
Steve Roden is a multimedia artist who works in painting, drawing, sculpture, video/film, and sound. Roughly put, he approaches painting, drawing, and sculpture as daily studio practices, while his sound and film/video work is usually created in response to a specific site and its history. But Roden is an exuberantly and sometimes confoundingly cross-disciplinary artist; he likes to create situations where there is slippage between mediums. The results are often playfully synaesthetic. One small example: a Roden painting from 2002 is called Listen (4'33"), taking its cue from John Cage's 1952 composition 4'33", itself a paradoxical example of what could be called "scored silence" or a "silent score." Scores are important to Roden—he will often use a formal schematic device (e.g., the title of Jacques Cousteau's book The Silent World) in order to generate a painting or a series of paintings. For his Silent World series, he devised a system of visual correspondences for each letter of each word in Cousteau's title; each painting was the product of the system variously deployed. The parameters that Roden creates, however goofy or arbitrary they may seem in and of themselves, free him up to work. Structure and procedure set beforehand, he proceeds to improvise, embellish, and subvert. Chance and whim play a part along with the predetermined scheme, and the paintings that result never look predictable. There is the score, then there is what the conductor or musician chooses to do with the score. Roden employed a number of generative systems in the work he made in Marfa, but he also allowed that work to be freely affected by his new surroundings. The results were on view at the Locker Plant at the end of February. Hung in the building?s small middle room was a series of fifteen drawings, each originally "scored" to twenty crooked black lines that Roden drew on a daily basis while studying fallen twigs and branches in the Locker Plant's courtyard. Those twenty lines provided each drawing with an armature, a musical staff of sorts. Roden took off from there, using watercolors, markers, colored pencils, and rubbings to turn each "staff" into an improvised exploration of color, line, pattern, and form. Six paintings and two sculptures in the front room were also, in a way, locally inspired. Roden began the paintings by studying the Locker Plant's patchwork ceilings, then built up the canvases from there. As always, though, the artist made room for collision, reversal, and chance. The paintings showed traces of their originating scheme, only to veer off wildly. Line, pattern, and color appeared now neat and precise, now woozy or soused. To devise the color scheme for the sculptures—two knee-high cairns constructed from wooden blocks—Roden turned to words again, this time assigning a color to each letter of every word in a statement by Donald Judd. Thus the two sculptures, while unmistakably Roden's, quote Judd. In the Locker Plant's back room Roden created a sort of meditative space. A sound piece, created using a tone generator and ambient noise recorded at Chinati, acted as an aural sine wave rising and falling through the room. On view was a single painting; nearby was a detached door that Roden used to "size" it. A bunch of twigs—source of the "twenty lines"—sat on the floor. Otherwise the big room was empty. A bench was available so that visitors could sit, look, and listen. Steve Roden has a MFA degree from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA and a BFA from Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. He has been exhibiting his work and staging sound performances in galleries and museums internationally since the early 1990s. As part of Marfa Ballroom's Marfa Sessions exhibition in 2008, he collaborated with Steven Vitiello on a sound performance created in response to (and on the site of) Donald Judd's 100 works in mill aluminum at Chinati. In recent years he has had solo exhibitions at Susanne Vielmetter LA Projects, Los Angeles; the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Studio la Citta, Verona, Italy; Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena; and others. Roden lives in Pasadena.
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