Robin Rhode

The South African–born, Berlin-based artist Robin Rhode is best known for performances in which he interacts with hand-drawn street art, but his first exhibition in Los Angeles places a stronger emphasis on exploring the regimes of photographic vision. In this spare but evocative show, drawings and bodies occupy the same flat optical space in photos that are at once sites of control and possibility.

A sequence of fifteen black-and-white images titled Pan’s Opticon, 2008, depicts a dark-skinned man, anachronistically dressed in pin-striped suit and boater hat, facing away from the viewer. Extending from his eyes, the arms of a drawing compass seem to trace a proliferation of black, bubblelike arcs onto a white wall. In the final image, they stop dead, affixed at their tips to two solid, ominously dripping stains. With a nod to the stuttering frames of early cinema, the work suggests that mechanically enhanced vision is a means of both whimsical creation and violent restriction, delimiting what is seen and how.

Promenade, 2008, is more hopeful. In this digital animation of stills, a man strides along a wall that is quickly covered in a mysterious hailstorm of hand-drawn white diamonds. The shapes turn sinister, hemming him in on all sides. Pressing and pulling, he eventually reduces the mass to a single diamond held gingerly between thumb and forefinger. With a haunting piano sound track by Arenor Meyer, the work is a poignant encouragement to take matters into one’s own hands. By uniting imagined and corporeal realities in the liminal space of photography, Rhode suggests a fluidity between the two that is not only generative but potentially liberating.