Kate Rhoades

In Jim Henson’s seminal 1989 film, Labyrinth, there is a scene in which the protagonist, Sarah is lured to a garbage dump by a woman covered in junk. The Junk Lady wears her possessions on her back like a shell as she leads Sarah to a room that looks exactly like her room at home, and tries to convince her that she is back on earth and not in the Goblin Kingdom. In my video, Karen, I have created a back story for the Junk Lady. In the original film she is shown as a remorseless villain conning helpless youths into being eternally enslaved by the Goblin King. In my work I am imagining how the Junk Lady, aka Karen came to have this strange occupation. Perhaps her tough exterior belied a pained but tender heart.

This video was part of a project at the Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Art that focused on the assassination of William McKinley which happened at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901. The video is paired with a deeply researched graphic novel that I made which chronicles the life of the assassin, Leon Czolgosz. The video is a more comedic representation of some the characters involved, including Teddy Roosevelt, Emma Goldman, Emil Schilling, and others. This piece of history is compelling to me because of its impact on Americans' views of anarchism and the labor movement then and now.

This is a recreation of the pyrotechnic display that greeted President William McKinley at the Pan American Exposition in 1901 on the night before his assassination.

This video was part of a project called "Calfskin" located in a building which was once Stompers Boots, a staple of the Folsom Street leather district in San Francisco. In this work I was thinking about leather, cattle, and the queer BDSM community. I was also reflecting on the species divide and the history of subjugation and abjection that animals, queer humans, and mythical human-animal hybrids have shared. The actor giving the animal sacrifice in this video is Kevin Clarke, who lives near the exhibition space and is also a proud Taurus.

Solo exhibition at Royal NoneSuch Gallery

May 12 - July 1st 2018

Exhibition Statement:

Back in the day, a Greek king named Ixion murdered his father-in-law. Society said, 'Whoa! That’s way out of line!' So he was left to wander without a country. Zeus felt bad for him and brought him to Mount Olympus for dinner. Sure enough, Ixion started sexually harassing Zeus’s wife Hera. Zeus manifested a cloud woman identical to Hera and sent her to Ixion to catch him being a total asshole. Once Ixion had sex with the cloud woman, Zeus said, 'Got ya! Now I’m tying you to a wheel that will spin for all eternity!' Cloud woman became pregnant with a baby, Centaurus, who was part horse, part human. The gods were disgusted and sent Centaurus down to the mortal realm. He mated with the female horses in the Greek region of Magnesia, and their progeny were the centaurs. Half man, half beast, the centaurs were said to be brash, violent, and impulsive, just like their terrible ancestor, Ixion.

Why?! Why are all the centaurs made to look this way? Like many mythical tales, the story of the centaurs served to glorify the conquering tribe and dehumanize the conquered, depicting them as subhuman beasts. The myth of the centaurs has its roots in the political conflicts that occurred in Thessaly, Greece, before the first century BCE. The Lapiths, the mythical people that drove out the centaurs, are based on an actual tribe in Thessaly, which subjugated and displaced the other tribes in the region. This vanquishing tribe perpetuated these stories, depicting the Lapiths as heroes and the tribes they conquered as literal savage animals. The centaur story is one of nationalism and conquest.

The Mares of Magnesia exhibition includes four rocking sculptures with embedded videos and a wall painting inspired by Greek landscape paintings. Audience members must mount the wooden upholstered forms, physically enacting a series of vulnerable horse-like positions. As viewers become active participants in the mythological relationship between humans, the centaurs, and their horse mothers, the mares of Magnesia, they are invited to somatically reimagine a hybrid inter-species that exists beyond the hero/monster narrative.

A rideable sculpture that includes a video screen inside, which the participant views by sticking their face in a hole.

Materials: pleather, wood, metal, video screen, upholstery foam

Thanks to Barbara Obata for help making these.

First part of an ongoing research project about elder queers/lesbians that I started in Porto, Portugal during a residency at Pedreira.

Performance lecture for Talkies at the Little Roxie in San Francisco.

This is a video is about anxiety.

Based on actual events.

First nine parts of a 300 part series of short video vignettes based on art theoretical or art historical texts.

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