Steve Roden: In Between

Steve Roden

Southern California artist Steve Roden is known as more than a painter; his internationally acclaimed, multi-media sound-driven works use musical scores that offer him a set of options to compose a segment of painting, sculpture, or other formal composition. This template results in a startlingly diverse array of images, objects, sounds and spaces. Roden’s every artwork, whatever its form, is both familiar yet utterly unexpected. He’s an eccentric virtuoso whose paintings look abstract, but only in the way that a chair, a tree, a face or even a Pop-Tart becomes abstract the longer you look at it. This catalog of a 20-year mid-career survey of Roden’s work includes an illustrated essay by curator Howard N. Fox and a CD with the four soundtracks from Roden installations.