Jason Rhoades: CHERRY Makita - Honest Engine Work

On September 11, 1993 the gallery will open an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles based artist Jason Rhoades. The exhibition, entitled "CHERRY Makita- Honest Engine Work" will be the artists first one-person show in New York City.

"CHERRY Makita- Honest Engine Work" is the latest project in an ongoing group of exhibitions which the artist has been working on during the past three years. Common to all of these exhibitions is the physical presence of the "working" artist in the gallery, even after the show has opened to the public and the traditional installation process should have been completed. In this particular installation the artist situates into the gallery space the hallucinations and fantasies of a weekend hobby-mechanic. In the course of this fantasy the artist renovates a structure that he describes as a semi-suburban garage. Inside of this homemade construction the artist attempts handiwork and operates the "CHERRY -Makita".

Location

43 Greene Street New York

Dates

September 11—October 16, 1993

Artist

Jason Rhoades

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CHERRY Makita - Honest Engine Work

"Jason Rhoades’ first one-man show is an installation called Cherry Makita – Honest Engine Work. He has turned the gallery into an in-progress construction of what could be either a mechanic’s shop or a home hobbyist’s refuge. The room is filled to the brim with an assortment of found and made objects. Dusty work clothes are neatly folded amidst heaps of mutated assemblages. A rocking horse sports a tumorous growth of foil, wire and tape. Some objects are obviously fakes: a flimsy cardboard rabbit hutch or a paper microwave which pretends to heat a lump of his signature tin foil. Pin-up girl calendars attest to the realness of the endeavour, as do unused paper signs which spell out the show’s title in Letterset.

In the centre of the room a half-built structure raised on beams sits like a funeral pyre. This is the heart, the house of the fantastical ‘Cherry Makita’."—From a review of the exhibition by Collier Schorr Frieze magazine, 1993

An installation view of the exhibition Jason Rhoades: CHERRY Makita - Honest Engine Work, at David Zwirner New York, dated 1993.

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