A South African artist who calls Berlin home, Robin Rhode is known for stop-action photographs and short animated films that capture sequential images of whimsical wall drawings as they're being made.
His latest show presents a sequence of 16 photos hung in a grid, each a bird’s-eye view of young boy surfing—except he’s nowhere near the beach. Instead, he’s in his clothes, sprawled on his back on the sidewalk, as his feet props a surfboard flat against a white exterior wall painted with rows of blue arcs. As the images progress, more and more of the arcs begin to appear, until, eventually, they interlock to form a pattern of circles meant to suggest the ocean. Meanwhile, the boy twists and turns on his surfboard as he rides the “waves.”
Complementing the piece is a mural on one of the gallery walls. The scene consists of four vinyl silhouettes depicting 17th-century merchant ships. The choppy seas surrounding the vessels were added by children from nearby schools using absurdly giant crayons provided by the artist.
A nearby video shows the kids having to work in pairs in order to lift these unwieldy implements. However adorable, their difficulties suggest that Rhode’s playfulness masks darker allusions to his homeland’s history of colonialism and oppression.—Paul Laster