Installation of Rhoades's Sutter's Mill
2017
The gallery presented Sutter's Mill, an installation by Jason Rhoades,in Art Basel Unlimited 2017.
Sutter's Mill (2000)is Rhoades's reconstruction of Gold Rush pioneer John Sutter's still-extant water-powered sawmill in Coloma in California, near the artist's childhood home. Using aluminum pipes from Rhoades's 1999 Perfect World installation at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, the life-size structure was first presented at David Zwirner in New York in 2000. Per the artist's instructions, the installation in Art Basel Unlimited will be constantly dismantled and rebuilt by trained handlers during the course of the fair. Next to the model of the mill, various items including replacement pipes, protective headgear, and polishing cloths are laid out on wooden stands to indicate that work is always in progress.
As the art historian Eva Meyer-Hermann notes, the mill is "a symbol not only of artistic production (signified by the gold), but also of a creative process that in principle will never reach a conclusion and that will also never be available to the recipient in a neatly packaged form." Sutter's Mill was included in the critically acclaimed exhibition Jason Rhoades, Four Roads, which travelled from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia to the Kunsthalle Bremen in Germany and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead in England in 2013-2015.