Jason Rhoades : PeaRoeFoam

Up to his untimely death in 2006 at 41, Jason Rhoades carried out a continuous assault on aesthetic conventions and the rules governing the art world - wryly subverting those very conditions by using them as materials for his work. In 2002, Rhoades introduced the world to his PeaRoeFoam, a 'brand new product and revolutionary new material' created from whole green peas, fish-bait style salmon eggs, and white virgin-beaded foam. When combined with non-toxic glue, they transform into a versatile, fast-drying, and ultimately hard material that he intended for both utilitarian as well as artistic uses - his detailed step-by-step instructions accompanied do-it-yourself kits complete with everything needed to make PeaRoeFoam. This seminal publication is the first to examine and situate the PeaRoeFoam project within Rhoades's career and to acknowledge its importance within the framework of his practice. Much like the exhibition it accompanies, which presents many of the individual components for the first time since their original installations, the book discusses and reproduces those initial presentations in depth, and includes an abundance of archival documents and photographs, installation views of all three shows, as well as the artist's diagrams and drawings related to their creation. The publication also features a personal and revealing essay by David Zwirner, who began showing Rhoades's work in the early 1990s, new scholarship by Julien Bismuth, and selected interviews from the Jason Rhoades Oral History project, conceived by Lucas Zwirner and Dylan Kenny, who have interviewed over fifty artists, curators, friends, collaborators, art historians, and others who intimately knew the artist - including curator and art historian Linda Norden.