Steve Roden: A Year of Skies

Steve Roden, artist and performer from Pasadena, has published various CDs – also under the name in be tween noise – as well as the important “Site Of Sound” (with Brandon LaBelle), a text on the relations between sound and architecture. He is gaining a wider and wider reputation as a representative of Sound Art, a heterogeneous international movement which has only recently achieved a full recognition by the contemporary art world, which had previously tended to overlook it. The Resonanzen II show, starting the 15th September at the prestigious Staadgalerie Saarbrücken, next to renowned masters such as Christina Kubisch and Bernhard Leitner, truly confirms the value of Roden's work. Nowadays, a large scale solo exhibition at Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum features, besides a site specific sound installation, paintings, sculptures, drawings and films. In fact, Steve Roden recognizes himself only partially in the sound artist definition and the e/static show itself, his first solo exhibition in Italy, will prove his versatility.
Usually, Roden starts his work when urged by an object, an image or a sound which he finds or rather finds once again – loaded the latter with memories that emerge out of oblivion. Such objects have often a very precise formal or structural organization, which Roden partially supports but then upsets in order to reach, through a reconstructing process based upon a sequence of connections, another new and unforeseen system – of sounds, signs, colours or images – which has in itself its own plausibility.