Edgelands: The Paintings of Carol Rhodes
David Cohen, Artcritical
May 2018
Carol Rhodes depicts what have been called “edgelands,” the environmentalist Marion Shoard’s term for the kind of non-descript terrains given over to transit, storage, mineral extraction, reservoirs and landing strips. Landscapes never given back to nature, these are places defined by human exploitation rather than habitation. Rhodes is a “realist” in the sense of the acuteness of her politics and the unsentimental report of her gaze. But her compositions are also inventions, made up non-sites conjoining disparate details from the aerial photographs that are her source material. […]