American
Born: U.S.
Geoffrey Alan Rhodes is a filmmaker and installation artist living in Chicago. His work seeks to open up new ground for cinema, challenging barriers between the real and the imaginary, documentary and narrative, the actual and the fictional. His art gallery work plays with the boundaries between photo, film, and installation, and has been exhibited at the International Society for Electronic Arts, the European Media Arts Festival, Media Art Friesland, the Moscow International Film Festival, and the Chelsea Museum of Art in New York City, among others. In 2010 he co-directed the narrative feature film Buried Land with Steven Eastwood, shot on location in the Valley of the Pyramids in Visoko, Bosnia. He has received multiple grants from the Princess Grace Foundation, New York Council for the Humanities, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, and others.
Rhodes received a Master of Fine Arts from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2005 and a PhD from the Programme in Communication & Culture at York University in Toronto in 2010. While at York, he was a Fulbright Scholar and Researcher at the Future Cinema Lab. From 2008 through 2011 he was an assistant professor in the School of Film & Animation at Rochester Institute of Technology. As of August 2011 he is an assistant professor in the department of Visual Communication Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In a 2010 artist's statement, Rhodes wrote:
"The work I've made in the Western New York region (if you include Toronto) over the past seven years has consistently inspected the line between cinema and the gallery in a number of ways. This comes from things in me—pulled in both directions by my own desires for expression and recognition and by the collision of arriving from a Seattle-based independent film community into an avant-garde video community in Buffalo in 2003. In feature film work, gallery installations, and festival shorts I've made work that inspects the line between the cinematic and the actual, the photo and the moving image, the narrative and the durational, the performative and the structural. This hasn't really changed, but the folds have gotten deeper. I have just completed my second feature film that plays with the fictional as real, I am developing a multi-channel video installation that will dissect the structural basis of cinema into screens, and am currently working with a new-technology device that makes film into a deck of cards using Augmented Reality. Describing my work, I run the danger of coming off as a formalist, interested more in the self-reflexive structures of media than in them as materials of expression. But this is an impression that comes from hearing about my work, not from seeing it. I find in these collisions of ideas an expressive dialectic—a way to deconstruct a medium to find myself in it. In its most direct form this can be seen in my long series of auto-performances where through a trick of the production and editing a fantasmic cinema-situation is created that acts as the stage for one long take performance/ gesture. For me, that's what it is all about, trying to invent enough in the situation of production to make that media circuit fresh and active—to electrify something in the wires, feel the lens and screen again, and see." [1]
For more information on Geoffrey Alan Rhodes's work, visit http://garhodes.com/.
[1] Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, "Statement," http://garhodes.com/bio.html. (Accessed 07/08/2013.)