Since the death of the Los Angeles artist Jason Rhoades in 2006 from an accidental drug overdose and heart disease at 41, his exuberant life has always threatened to overshadow his short career. But Rhoades, a canny student of pop culture, seemed to have anticipated that idea almost from the beginning.
His sculpture and writing were as obsessively self-referential as a celebrity’s Twitter feed. In “Volume A,” a 1998 book, he arranged information about his art and life into a cross-referenced encyclopedia that includes entries on sheep (he raised them as a youth in rural California); the movie “Car Wash” (he was crazy about it but not quite sure why); cocaine; Brancusi; and Bert, his father’s dog, born with an anatomical defect that caused its anus to be almost on its back.
In “Jason Rhoades, Four Roads,” the first American museum survey of his career, which opens on Wednesday at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Bert the dog reappears as one of hundreds of biographical references in “The Creation Myth,” a room-filling installation that attempts to represent in sculptural form how humanity processes information, forms memories and produces potentially transcendent things like art out of such messy raw material.
The piece, never before seen in the United States, stands as a kind of metaphor for the questions the exhibition is asking about Rhoades’s work in the absence of its creator:
“Do the pieces need Jason to be here to animate them?” Ingrid Schaffner, the institute’s chief curator, said. “Do they stand apart from him and the tragedy of his death? And I think they do. They’re powerfully alive.”
An early practitioner and one of the champions of the form known as scatter art, he made environments composed of Home Depots’ worth of off-the-shelf hardware and electronics, eBay salvage, clothes, pieces cannibalized from other artworks and even food, all of which were assembled with painstaking precision.