Ron Rhodes began constructing spare miniature architectural interiors some years before he was diagnosed as having AIDS. Rhodes’ awareness that he was dying prompted him to use this same format to explore the theme of the stations of the cross. Meticulously realized architectural forms—domestic , industrial, religious, or public—make up the core of his early work. Gabriel, 1982, is an apartment kitchen or living room complete with a table on which lie the dishes and utensils of an abandoned meal; House of the Deer, Segment VI, 1984, is an elongated industrial space reminiscent of a ship’s boiler room, with catwalks, exposed pipes, platforms, and ladders; House of the Deer, Segment I, 1982, recalls a Greek church with a raised altar-sarcophagus at the center. Rhodes populated his all-white spaces with urns, antlers, angels’ wings, and tree branches. Solitary human figures, often nude male angels, appear in spectral photographic images, seeming trapped in wall or floor planes or on the screens of tiny televisions.
Despite the emptiness and implied loneliness of the interiors, Rhodes’ works are charged with homoerotic energy. Images of bound torsos and penises and other references to sexual rituals intrude on the pristine whiteness of the spaces. The frequent curtains, veils, and surveillance monitors suggest Rhodes’ anxiety about revealing his sexuality In most cases viewers must circumambulate the pieces and crane their necks to peer into the interiors, forcing themselves into the role of voyeurs.
With the “Stations of the Cross” series, 1988–89, Rhodes returned to the religiousness of his childhood. In these wall pieces, he employs the Greek cross plan. Particularly striking is Rhodes’ use of the image of the catwalk to depict both the increasing torment of Christ’s three falls and his own agonizing struggle with AIDS. In The First Fall, a white walkway extends across the space; in The Second Fall, it is broken off in midair; and in The Third Fall, the now blood-red walkway is mangled and protrudes through the work’s shattered glass screen. Other crosses contain symbolic relics. In Jesus and Veronica, a silver cloth represents the veil on which Jesus left an imprint of his face, while two rusted iron spikes driven into the frame prefigure the crucifixion; in Christ Comforts the Women, a wreath or crown of black fake flowers is wrapped in a serpentine coil of barbed-wire thorns that projects menacingly into the room.
The series combines familiar religious imagery with more personal autobiographical material—photographs of the artist and his friends, cloth flowers made by his mother, and imagery drawn from his immediate surroundings. In using the Christ metaphor to deal with his own struggle with AIDS (the artist died last October), Rhodes risked lapsing into pathos and melodrama, and works such as The Third Fall and The Crucifixion, in which a coal-black cross is slashed with lightning bolts, do border on the histrionic. But, for the most part, Rhodes’ work is restrained, austere, and oblique in its allusions to pain and suffering, and the most moving works are those in which the artist holds something back. The story of the stations of the cross is meant to provide worshipers with an understanding of Christ’s suffering through a vicarious experience of it. These highly personalized works help the viewer understand Rhodes’ suffering, while helping the artist reconcile himself with a religious tradition at odds with his sexual preference.
—Lois E. Nesbitt
