‘In the Pit’ with Ingrid Schaffner at ‘The Racetrack’

About Ingrid Schaffner
Internationally admired as a curator, art critic, writer, and educator with nearly four decades of experience in the field of contemporary art, Schaffner is known for her generative and original scholarship focused on themes of archiving and collecting, photography, feminism, and alternate modernisms. Her 2013 exhibition ‘Jason Rhoades, Four Roads’ was the first American museum presentation of the sculptor’s work and was accompanied by a catalogue publication (Prestel); following its presentation at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, the exhibition traveled to Kunsthalle Bremen and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. Schaffner was the curator of the 57th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2018. where she presented major installations by El Anatsui, Alex Da Corte, Zoe Leonard, Postcommodity and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, among others. From 2020 to 2023, she was the curator at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

About ‘Jason Rhoades. DRIVE’
For Jason Rhoades, the car was a vehicle of artistic pursuit, both readymade sculpture and American idol. Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles dedicates an entire gallery at its Downtown Arts District location to a yearlong exploration of Rhoades’ art via the subject of cars and car culture. ‘DRIVE,’ will unfold over a series of thematic iterations, an ever-changing exhibition of Rhoades’ sculptures, drawings, videos and multiples—enriched by archival materials, public programs and contemporary perspectives. Organized as an investigation in real time, ‘DRIVE’ invites people to approach the exhibition like a garage of art and ideas, in which cars are coming and going and tinkering is a productive state of mind.

Jason Rhoades (1965—2006) grew up engine adept, fixing and driving motorbikes, cars, trucks and other vehicles in rural Northern California. He studied with Richard Jackson and Paul McCarthy at UCLA, where he earned his MFA in 1993. It was with characteristic pragmatism and brash ludicrousness that he conducted his final lap of art school performing heats in a tiny red Formula One kit car on a miniature racetrack that he constructed out of cardboard. His epic-scaled installations established him as a force of the international art world in the 1990s while based in Los Angeles, where driving is as much a part of daily life as being stuck in traffic.