Born in Glasgow in 1959
Carol Rhodes, makes small, affecting aerial landscapes on squarish wooden panels, in severely muted colors. Narrow roads cut straight or wind across the rectangle, dividing broad areas textured to resemble agricultural fields, forests, sand or bodies of water. Here and there you can make out tiny buildings or industrial installations — a quarry, a water treatment plant — but a lack of specificity makes it hard to tell exactly what most of these elements are. The main impression is of yawning emptiness; these places, which Carol Rhodes makes up using photographic sources, have the look of rural wastelands. Though adroitly handled, the flip-flop between picture plane and deep space is nothing new; nor is the equation of aerial landscape and abstract design. What is distinctively appealing in Ms. Rhodes’s work is a mood of numbed lonesomeness. The distanced view, the unpopulated vacancy and the repressed color evoke a state for which a therapist might recommend Prozac.
Source: Ken Johnson, New York Times