Year-long exhibition in Los Angeles celebrates legendary petrol head Jason Rhoades

Jason Rhoades revs his trangressive humour © Estate of Jason Rhoades, Courtesy the Estate of Jason Rhoades and Hauser & Wirth
For Traffic, Nicolas Bourriaud’s ground-breaking 1996 exhibition of relational aesthetics, Jason Rhoades (1965-2006) bought a used Chevrolet Caprice and had the CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux cover 49% of its cost. “The car established Jason as this provocateur,” says Ingrid Schaffner, Hauser & Wirth’s curatorial senior director. Rhoades photographed the Caprice all over Los Angeles, merging the readymade with the automotive spirit of Southern California, then sent the photographs to Bordeaux but kept the car. Years later, Rhoades convinced a collector that the Caprice had appreciated in value, and he traded it for a Ferrari 328 GTS. “How he ends up with both cars is another story,” says Schaffner.
These vehicles are central ele-ments of Rhoades’s Car Projects, a series of conceptual works the artist made during his celebrated but tragically brief career. Both, along with Rhoades’s Chevy Impala and Ligier microcar, have also been taken out of storage for DRIVE, a new year-long exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in downtown Los Angeles (until 14 January 2025). Parked in the gallery, the vehicles appear alongside the artist’s sculptures, videos and ephemera, as well as public programming that includes performances and films. Elements of the exhibition will be continuously changed out with quarterly themes: The Parking Space, The Pit, The Racetrack and The Garage.
Marking Schaffner’s curatorial debut at the gallery, DRIVE presents the cars as “a cast of characters, each with its own history that we’re going to unpack over the course of the exhibition”, she says. To Rhoades, the car reflected both a modernist vision of accelerating into the future and the American autonomy of the open road. On daily commutes between his home in Pasadena and studio in Inglewood, Rhoades thought of the Caprice as an extension of the studio. He recast his Impala as a mobile exhibition space, naming it the “International Museum Project About Leaving and Arriving”. Rhoades imagined his cars accruing their own mythologies before ultimately settling down as sculpture. In his world-building practice, says Schaffner, “making sculpture and making stories were entwined forms of construction”.
The exhibition forms a portrait of Los Angeles, where the car has inspired countless artists. In a city where the car is often understood as an extension of the self, this exhibition also reads as a portrait of Rhoades, so traces of the artist remain in small details, including cassette tapes in glove compartments and the Thomas Guide in the backseat.

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