steve roden
steve roden is a visual and sound artist from los angeles. his work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, text works, and performance.
roden’s working process uses various forms of specific notation (words, musical scores, maps, etc.) and translates them through self invented systems into scores; which then influence the process of painting, drawing, sculpture, writing, and sound composition. these scores, rigid in terms of their parameters and rules, are also full of holes for intuitive decisions and left turns. the inspirational source material becomes a kind of formal skeleton that the abstract finished works are built upon.
in the visual works, translations of information such as text and maps, become rules and systems for generating visual actions such as color choices, number of elements, and image building. in the sound works, singular source materials such as objects, architectural spaces, and field recordings, are abstracted through humble electronic processes to create new audio spaces, or “possible landscapes.” the sound works present themselves with an aesthetic roden describes as “lower case”—sound concerned with subtlety and the quiet activity of listening.
roden’s works have been exhibited and performed at museums, galleries, arts spaces, festivals, and public spaces internationally, since the late 1980s, including: susanne vielmetter LA and berlin projects, studio la citta gallery verona italy, the mercosur biennial porto alegre brazil, centre georges pompidou paris, the san diego museum of contemporary art, the ucla hammer museum los angeles,the museum of contemporary art EMST athens, the singuhr-horgalerie in parochial, berlin, the serpentine gallery london, the san francisco museum of modern art, the walker art center, minneapolis.
he will have a mid-career survey of his visual and sound works at the armory center for the arts in pasadena california in september 2010. for more info: http://www.inbetweennoise.com/index.html