steve roden
the surface of the moon & letter forms
exhibition: suyama space, seattle, wa may - august 2003

installation shots of an exhibition at suyama space seattle.


surface of the moon (floor), 2001/2002, wood, wire, gesso, pencil, tin foil, bees wax on aluminum base, dimensions variable.

letter forms (wall), 2002, wood, embroidery thread, glue, polyurethane, dimensions variable.

for more on the surface of the moon click here





for more on letter forms click here

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Steve Roden
Suyama Space

Intricate systems and coded information underlie the most relevant abstractions these days--stubborn logic made visual, so that it dwells in the gap between perceiving and knowing. What sets Steve Roden's work apart from the general movement toward visual information is that while many artists use this theme to assign a kind of beauty and mystery to stunningly abstruse and dull data, Roden returns beauty and mystery to beautiful and mysterious entities that have had it categorized away.

Roden's two systems on display this summer take as their starting points the moon and the clouds, both of which have a world of romantic and literary associations. For each, Roden has created a complex external system of interpretation, based on the taxonomy of clouds and the names given to the craters of the moon. But his system is not based on what is represented by the words, but on the words themselves--the number of vowels and the frequency of their appearance, with different letters assigned to different objects and materials and sounds, so that the result is far from the original, and entirely unexpected.

The Surface of the Moon, at Suyama Space, is the mind-blower, with rows and rows of tiny sculptures that look somehow like a Canadian skyline. Each sculpture--built from wood, wax, wire, pencil, gesso, and tin foil--represents the name of a landmass or crater, and it is not so much a matter of guessing which is which (you can't), but in marveling at the distance traveled from concept to object. Roden's apparent randomness contains an intricately thought-out order, but is still predominantly chaotic, like the unknowable moon and disorderly clouds.

emily hall,
the stranger
june 26, 2003