Distance tactics: Carol Rhodes and painting at the periphery

This article approaches Carol Rhodes’s painting in spatial terms and argues that their attentive scanning of peripheral landscapes and careful working of surface materialities are conditioned by the compromised space of painting that Rhodes encountered in the 1980s and 1990s. Returning to texts from the period that demonstrate the sociopolitical substrates of spatial visualizations, the necessity for distance tactics in an approach to painting are considered. Griselda Pollock’s description of spatial limitation and gendered exclusion through a delineation of ‘spaces of femininity’, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s articulation of the oppositional coupling of smooth vs. striated space and Martin Jay’s mapping of divergent scopic regimes and their spatial consequences are collectively mustered to account for the complexity of Rhodes’s negotiation of painting’s spatiality, and the compelling codependence between painting method and pictorial content these works produce.