Beginning January 4, 2007, Stephen G. Rhodes will present Recurrency, a solo exhibition of video, sculpture, photographs, and drawings. As is the case with much of Rhodes’ work, Recurrency plays on and with language: the title collapses the term “currency”—the hallucinatory circulation of capital—into a psychoanalytic understanding of trauma’s morbid, directionless and infinite repetitions—or recurrences.
The title also alludes to Ambrose Bierce’s 1891 short story about the hanging of a Confederate gentleman, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” and more importantly, the story’s eponymous 1962 adaptation as a short film. Rhodes encountered the film, repeatedly, in grammar school in Louisiana, where the film enjoyed a strange celebrity due to its perennial exhibition to students in the 1970s and 80s. Projected before classes at every grade level by teachers who made no effort to contextualize its Civil War setting, the film—as a species of recurrence—seemed to perform no labor other than to fill up 25 minutes of a class period before the ringing of the bell.
Central to Recurrency are three sculptural structures resembling various gallows platforms or stages, all strewn with shattered green screen detritus. From one structure two synchronized videos are projected onto the opposing walls of the gallery. The videos extend, loosely and wildly, the film version of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” in which a man is seen at the gallows awaiting his imminent death, only to enjoy the good fortune of the rope of his noose snapping. The man falls into the creek below, and the film follows his subsequent harried return to his plantation estate where he finds his wife. Upon embracing her, he grasps his neck in agony; a brusque jump cut intervenes to reveal the man hanging from the bridge. Recurrency liquidates the dream ploy, but cleaves to the mise-en-scéneof the noose and the escape through a rural southern landscape. The videos sustain a loop in which we witness the subject’s infinite flight from/return to the gallows. |
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