Geoffrey
Alan Rhodes is a researcher and experimental filmmaker
based in Toronto, Ontario and upstate New York.
He creates both films and installation video art for the gallery,
and is a member of the London video art collective Octopus, whose
goal
is to challenge the boundaries between gallery art and cinema.
Rhodes draws on his background as a composer and musician in the
Seattle
Arts scene to approach visual art with that medium's love for the
confluence
of the profound and the popular. His past film and installation
works have focused on two areas: our changing relationship to time
in the
digital age, and sexual identity in media-saturated worlds, concentrating
especially on the digital fantastic of new media by combining diverse
media, layers, and channels into juxtapositions beyond film montage.
Rhodes received his Master of Fine Arts from the University at Buffalo,
and is currently completing a Fulbright funded PhD at York University in Toronto. He has received ongoing support from the international
Princess Grace Foundation, which awarded him their Graduate Film
Award in 2004, and continues to combine gallery exhibition with international
cinema screenings of new works.
Artist's Statement
The current digital age contains the second image revolution. The first came
with the mechanical reproduction of an object's image. This has now been taken
a fold deeper; the virtual space within which the image exists has expanded.
It now encompasses multiple channels,
windows, and layers of virtual context, manipulation, and interaction.
My works use this virtual space as a visual language to examine time and the
image, and to wrest a new material for expression.