Archive Project 17: Steve Roden

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The Project Series
Project 17: Steve Roden

For over ten years, Steve Roden, who works in Pasadena, has been creating drawings, paintings, sculpture, film, and sound works that combine a sensuous materiality with intellectual rigor. The artist’s creative process reflects a homemade aesthetic realized through a painstaking methodology that indicates artistic influences as diverse as Folk and Outsider art, and Conceptual and Fluxus projects. In the work exhibited here, Roden uses conceptual and intuitive frameworks to translate obscure systems of literary reference into visual designs. For Roden, “translation” means literally fracturing words and images into pieces and transferring them from the printed page to a new context. Instead of simply recreating source material, he aims to understand it more fully. While the original inspirations, and the corresponding self-made rules of translation, have a physical impact on the visual qualities of the finished works, the final abstract object exists on its own, independent of the artist and the source.

In this exhibition, Roden presented new paintings, photographs, sculptures, and an audio work created for this occasion. Following are brief descriptions of each body of work.

In the digital photographs fallen/spoken, Roden translated into English a book of Swedish poems by Par Lagerkvist, the winner of the 1951 Nobel Prize for Literature, using only the sound of the spoken words and their visual qualities to suggest English language equivalents.

the silent world paintings were created using a system of visual translation that began with a simple letter-to-measured-line equivalence: a= 1 inch-long line, b= 2 inch-long line, etc. Each painting contains a visual translation of the title of oceanographer Jacques Cousteau’s first book The Silent World.

Roden based the letter forms sculptures on the waveform images created by speaking or singing the letters of the alphabet into a computer. The vowels were colored following Rimbaud’s The Alchemy of the Verb.

Roden made the another another green world sculptures with his eyes closed, listening to different pieces of music from Brian Eno’s LP Another Green World. He has made “blind” listening drawings for years, and, with this sculpture, expanded the audio reactions of his hands to include sculptural forms. The six shades of green glaze are based on a system of grouping “songs” (and sculpture sessions) by rounding their lengths up or down to the nearest half minute.

Outside, on the Museum’s facade, Roden installed the sound work speak no more about the leaves. Inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s The Book of the Hanging Garden—which references Stefan George’s work by the same name—Roden uses the vowel structure from George’s poem as a score. He equates a series of five tones with the five vowels as he encountered them in the text. The sound was generated acoustically and then processed electronically.

Steve Roden’s exhibition wais the seventeenth in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of small exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator