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Jason Rhoades

Mi Saga, U Saga (Emmanuelle Saga), 2005

Multimedia installation Bench (polished aluminium tubes; concrete), Several neon phrases, 2 chandeliers, steel poles, clamps, speakers, Wailing Wall (plastic, metal table; Camel Toe Bone; PeaRoeFoam; neon; Plexiglas; electrical wiring), "1724 Birth of the cunt" publication
360 x 370 x 420 cm

Jason Rhoades' s Mi Saga, U Saga (Emmanuelle Saga) is a characteristically bewildering assemblage of objects – the enlarged fibreglass cast of a petrified camel’s toe bone found in Florida and purchased by the artist on eBay, glowing neon phrases tumbling from improvised chandeliers above a Recession-era bench, and a trademark Meccavulva (an aluminum cast designed in the shape of the mount that holds the Black Stone to a corner of the Kaaba shrine at Mecca) – arranged in seemingly arbitrary fashion, framed within a haphazard structure of metal piping, and dedicated to the cult heroine of 1970s soft-core pornographic films. It is a dark, comic and knowingly perverse commentary on sex, money, religion, crudely blended into a quietly inflammatory whole, and a provocative critique of the often conservative yardsticks by which all art, high and low, is traditionally judged. Mi Saga, U Saga (Emmanuelle Saga) can also be read as a critique of the forms of high art. Rhoades executes transformations and ideological investigations of objects. What might appear to be the giant, unstructured realm of a manic collector, is revealed to possess an order that is not completely transparent, but still seems to follow a system. The swelling accumulation of consumer goods and information materials that reaches monumental proportions becomes the content of the work.

*1965 Newcastle, California, USA, ✝ 2006