LIMITED EDITIONS FOR SALE

 

ROBIN RHODE

St. Bernard Parish
2008
Digital Pigment Print
30” x 45”
Edition of 24

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South African artist Robin Rhode made his first visit to New Orleans in early 2008, in preparation for his participation in Prospect.1.  Accompanied by an assistant who was also new to the city, Rhode began his tour by driving around New Orleans without a fixed destination, and was soon crossing the bridge into the Lower Ninth Ward. Continuing into St. Bernard Parish, Rhode used both still and video cameras to record images that capture the effects of flooding on houses in the neighborhood, and anything else that caught his attention. Some video footage from this initial visit became the basis for Rhode’s work Kite, which was shown at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) during Prospect.1.

Rhode’s initial site visit was marked by multiple run-ins with the law.  When he tried to film railroad tracks from beneath a train in the Bywater, he was stopped and questioned by undercover police. An attempt the next day to document a wall painting project was interrupted by an SUV that unexpectedly pulled up and used its lights and siren to surprise the artist. His third photographic expedition, during which this photo was taken, became even more problematic when he began filming a chemical plant -- a process that was interrupted by federal agents who informed Rhode he was breaking the law, and confiscated his film. After that incident, Rhode put his camera equipment away for the duration of his visit.

This enigmatic photograph, taken from inside the shell of a heavily damaged building looking outward, was exhibited in Rhode’s 2008 solo exhibition, Who Saw Who, at the Hayward Gallery in London, although it was not produced as an edition until now.  The most prominent visual element in the photograph is the canal that fills the middle ground, but our eye is simultaneously drawn to what appears to be a block of empty houses on the opposite shore, and halted by the vertical beam in the foreground that divides the composition into two halves. While the subject is undeniably bleak, Rhode brings a strong degree of ambiguity to the viewpoint of the artist/viewer, who is surrounded by the remains of a building without walls, with a gaping hole revealing a sky that appears, in both color and texture, nearly inseparable from the surrounding water.

 

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