Tomory Dodge

TOMORY DODGE

TOMORY DODGE

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

CAUGHT IN THE ACT: TOMORY DODGE’S PAINTINGS IN THE MAKING AND THE VIEWING

By Christopher Miles

Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought.... The greatest adventures, especially in a brutal and policed world, take place in the mind. Painting is a reality, among realities, which has been felt and formed. It is the pattern of choices made, from the realm of possible choices, which gives a painting its form.

— Robert Motherwell, “The Modern Painter’s World” (1944) 3

In 2002, I was visiting studios at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.

I had a piece of paper with a list of names on it and no further directions, and among the names was Jason Dodge. The artist was fairly new to the school at the time, and perhaps not a fully known entity. When I asked a student where I could find Jason, she looked a bit puzzled, and then said, “Oh yes, the painter,” and rattled off the directions I needed. The brief encounter was not unlike an experience I once had when, looking for an expatriate friend living in a small Italian hill town. I inquired of a stranger the whereabouts of my friend. The man offered a puzzled look in response, and then the words, “Oh, si, l’americano,” and he told me where he’d spotted my friend a few minutes prior. It turned out my friend, the only American living in the area, was better known by his nationality than his name. Dodge was like that at CalArts, which is itself something of a small hill town. There were other students working with paint and making paintings, but he was the one who had been, in the short time he’d been there, identified and set him apart as being a painter. It was readily apparent why this was the case. Being a painter

was in fact how he self-identified, through deeds more than words. And when he put it in words, they were not words about himself, but about painting. He was deeply into it, a believer.

I committed his name to memory because it was clear to me that I would be seeing his work again, and a couple of years later, after being momentarily confused by a name that seemed slightly unfamiliar, I looked at the work, recognized the painter, and wrote an early review of an exhibition by Tomory Dodge.

Fourteen years later, having shuffled, series by series, sometimes work by work, along sliding scales of representational and nonobjective inspirations, aspirations, endeavors, and ends, Dodge remains, in a field full of people working with paint and making paintings, not alone, but distinguished as a painter. He remains deeply invested in the undertaking and the process needed to arrive at a painting.

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Though Dodge’s paintings have at times been representational—quite singularly so in that they have seemed to deliver a lone and explicitly clear image—Dodge has never seemed as concerned with delivering works, the transcripts of which might begin with phrases like “a painting of...” or “a painting about...” as he has seemed given to producing works more aptly described with phrases beginning with “paintings that...” or “paintings arrived at by.... ” It is arguable that matters of aboutness—to the extent that the paintings might refer chiefly or explicitly to some referent(s), or that agendas might be explicitly rolled out by paintings—aren’t absent from Dodge’s concerns, but they surely come in a distant second behind an inclination toward discovery and arrival.

Even the titles applied to Dodge’s paintings seem to play with a resistance toward deciphering or reverse engineering. “Titles, of course, are frequently directions for interpretation,” wrote Arthur C. Danto in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, “which may not always be helpful, as when a painting of some apples is fantastically titled Annunciation.” Such problematizing of titles via titling itself is apparent even in the direct, seemingly deadpan titles of Dodge’s early works, such as Car, the title that refers to a depicted car while

neglecting the more intense information relayed in the image (an apparently burned out car shot full of holes). This arguably gives the work a heightened denotative charge, but it also affords the artist making the painting opportunities to work in numerous plays (such as pattern; positive and negative space; figure and ground; and complex, multi-spatial light logic) within a single image.

This is not to say that Dodge was looking to ditch what we might call the content of that early work so much as he was calling into question boundaries, specifics, fluidity of content, and content’s inseparability from form. A problematizing of titles, which echoes a problematizing of notions and assumptions of representation and abstraction (and of form and content) continues in the cases of recent works like Secret Message, a pattern-laden composition topped with an arching scrawl of neon-like script that seems to spell out something, but nothing discernable (and perhaps not whatever the secret is that the painting bears); or Mean Uncle, the title of which teases you into conjecture about the shapes, textures, and figure-ground relationships, and then maybe leads you to resign yourself to looking at the painting with a slightly different feeling because of what the words evoke; or All the Stars in You and Me, which reads initially like the heading of an inventory or the caption of a documentary image, until you remember that it’s something that can’t be counted and can’t be pictured (except in a realm like poetry or painting where what’s impossible can be made to seem possible or can be felt, even if it can’t be specifically pictured or articulated). For Dodge, painting is a place where all of the stars in you and me can’t be accounted for numerically or pictorially, but where the feeling and the thought that go with those words can be found, right where the artist found it. Dodge’s paintings are caught in the act, by their maker and their viewers.

“It’s an object that’s a window,” Dodge once said when describing what it is about painting that keeps him fascinated. “It’s this physical object but also it becomes this space...there’s a whole universe in that.” Looking back at Dodge’s oeuvre over the last two decades, one sees how fully the artist has sought to explore the avenues and opportunities within this universe over time (and in more recent years, how broadly he has sought to explore them within a body of work, or even within a painting). In a field of painting that was frequently

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dismissed as exhausted, compromised, bound in convention, and mired in end-game thinking during the decades prior to Dodge’s coming of age as an artist, Dodge asserts and exercises a committed optimism that a painting (and painting as a field of endeavor) has somewhere to go.

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“At a certain point, the idea has to be abandoned,” Dodge said to me when I visited his studio last fall as he was working on the paintings included in this exhibition. He reiterated that comment when I visited him early this year, revisited the paintings, and could see where some of that abandonment had led. Dodge’s assertion is less a hard-line refutation of the kind of thinking behind Sol LeWitt’s dictum about conceptual art (that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art,” followed up with insistences that an idea, once set in motion, should be “carried out blindly...not tampered with,” and allowed to “run its course”) than an identification of a starting point and a middle ground. LeWitt saw the “many side effects that the artist cannot imagine,” which arose out of a launched process, as useful in providing ideas for subsequent works—an internalization within a single artist’s practice of a means of generating new ideas in ways parallel to the “perpetual revolution” Michael Fried envisioned as playing out with Hegelian efficiency to bring up new formal problems among artists and between generations in the development of modernist painting.

Dodge, however, looks for a way, within the painting, to preserve and afford a sense of Harold Rosenberg’s famous description of the canvas as “an arena in which to act,” with the finished painting functioning as a record of decisions and moves made in process—“not a picture but an event.” While Rosenberg’s words suggest a view of the creative act as some kind of hot-and-bothered, heat-of-the-moment encounter characterized by explosive spontaneity on the part of the artist, Dodge’s practice suggests that making a painting is more akin to a combination of slow cooking and workman’s hours, undertaken from an informed position and followed through with an open mind. Dodge begins with an idea or set of ideas—a decision about a line of inquiry, composition, and/or action that will launch the painting—but he also begins with an educated understanding that an initializing idea can’t lay out a plan accounting for the variety of moves and ways of operating that Dodge may wish to bring to

bear in the creation of a painting (like some highly complex contingency plan or algorithm). Nor does it allow for the shifts and midstream decisions that no combination of if/then conditionals could provide for. Once working in the arena of the canvas, Dodge seems to rely less on if-then thinking than on nowthat, and what-if. The idea can get him into the painting, but it can’t get him out.

“How does abstraction maintain relevance to its own time when the initial sensation of its impact is gone?” Dodge commented in a 2012 interview. “It’s a question for painting, but also for art in general. You can make an abstract painting that would be earth-shattering in 1950, but now it may be just a nice painting.” The statement suggests not what Dodge is inclined to succumb to or settle for (a painting future generations may consider merely “nice”), but rather what he contends with—trying to locate painting’s ongoing propositional potential while acknowledging that newness is less easily registered, and many paths have been treaded and retreaded, while not giving in to the presumption of painting’s decline or demise. To this end, Dodge is fundamentally an optimist, and it’s evident in his harnessing of all things available—all he knows and is learning about material and process, about representation, and about the history of painting—in the production of works as both places to start and places to go. The far-searching, broad-reaching, conspicuous, promiscuous approach to approaches, suggests a painter, in his own historical moment, but also in the wake of a long history of aspiration and doubt in the enterprise of painting, using simultaneity, weaving, and density, not to suggest there’s nowhere to go but to affirm that there’s always a place for painting to go.

Experiencing the results of Dodge’s most recent studio endeavors, which allow patterns, gestures, marks, atmospheric and spatially suggestive vignettes, and elements that seem variously representational and/or abstract to move in and out of (and over and under) one another, is highly complex. A single painting can deliver varying treatments of light that edge toward the romantic, the phenomenological, or the illusionistically logical, with temperatures and glows that, combined with spaces and shapes, might variously suggest sun and stars, candles, neon, or soaking up screen time. The styles and strategies

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that are employed conjure associations with and attitudes of Abstract Expressionism, Pattern and Decoration, Cubism, Post-Cubism, Punk, New Wave, Vienna Secession, Bay Area Figuration, Psychedelia, and New Image Painting, to name a few and in no particular order. Compositional organization, combined with hints of spatial ordering via differing, and at times contradictory, means of light logic, atmospherics, transparency, overlapping, shifts in scale, and color minglings and juxtapositions leave one highly conscious of and generally unable to resolve figure/ground, surface/mark, figure/ space, figure/format, and surface/space relationships. These complexities often arise around the implication and evocation (in lieu of the explicit representation) of a figure or figures. These absent figures are so spectrally present that I can’t help seeing them in Dodge’s paintings, along with echoes of the ways other painters have handled figures overtly: the brutalistmonument-like picture domination of Pablo Picasso’s bathers; the movement through space and picture of Henri Matisse’s dancers; the calm negotiation of a figure’s place and prominence in pictures worked out in David Park and Joan Brown; the simultaneous insistence of personality and willingness to serve the picture in Alice Neel’s portraits; Helen Frankenthaler’s amalgamation of gestures into residual yet formidable figurative imprints; Robert Motherwell’s compressing and relief of pressure around dense gestural masses; Hans Hofmann’s negotiation of cohesion and fragmentation, with push and pull that I always thought was more like throwing elbows in a crowd than the balance of cluttered and clear; the Renaissance space and cartoon-page flatness that objects and characters inhabit in Philip Guston’s late work. There are no direct quotes of any of these artists—not super direct, anyway—in Dodge’s paintings, but they are present, often in combination, emerging and receding, conversing and competing—spectral indeed.

That sense of the spectral, of the haunt, is what I enjoy most about Dodge’s paintings, which are so insistently and materially concrete and fixed, but which perceptually and associatively are, like gatherings of ghosts, forever teasing me to catch them in the act. Standing in front of them, I think of the feeling of looking at lenticular prints with their images shifting as the angles of the light and the eye move in relation to the plane; of recalling a memory from a situation

in which the circumstances and visuals changed rapidly (of looking at a scene through the afterimage still on my retina of another scene from which I’ve looked away); of the fades and montages of cinema; of the shifts of an eye’s focus, when looking at a window under the right light, between what the glass allows one to see through it ahead of the viewer and what it reflects behind the viewer; of the wonderful and low-tech magic of the play of light and projections on scrims of an opera stage; of the veils of hallucination that can hang and flutter between one’s eyes of what is directly seen—all situations where one wonders what one has seen and is seeing, where one tries to replay in the moment or in the mind, to blink again, to hit rewind, to try to regain the exact point of view one had before moving, or to re-see a shadow after the light has changed.

It’s the kind of experience that, while fleeting, elusive, ghostly, maybe even distant and cool, can leave one feeling desperately present—searching, intimate, connected, warm. It is in providing such moments that Dodge’s paintings establish agency—made by an artist launching into and working through puzzles, fine messes, and maybe even occasional quagmires to world-build within the universe of the canvas, and to propose painting that is informed, astute, imaginative, and alive.

Christopher Miles is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. He is a professor at the School of Art at California State University, Long Beach.

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Secret Message, 2017 Oil on canvas 52 x 48 inches 132.1 x 121.9 cm

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Owl Time, 2018 Oil on canvas 78 x 60 inches 198.1 x 152.4 cm

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Cult, 2018 Oil on canvas 72 x 80 inches 182.9 x 203.2 cm

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Mean Uncle, 2018

Oil on canvas 48 x 40 inches 121.9 x 101.6 cm

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All the Stars in You and Me, 2018 Oil on canvas 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

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Mycelium, 2018 Oil on canvas 72 x 80 inches 182.9 x 203.2 cm

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The Tek, 2018 Oil on canvas 72 x 60 inches 182.9 x 152.4 cm

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Amongst Wildflowers, 2018 Oil on canvas 72 x 60 inches 182.9 x 152.4 cm

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Mr. Aggregate, 2018

Oil on canvas 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

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Orange Figure, 2018 Oil on canvas 60 x 60 inches 152.4 x 152.4 cm

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Arrangement, 2019

Oil on canvas 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

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Country Life, 2019

Oil and acrylic on canvas 72 x 60 inches 182.9 x 152.4 cm

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Star Man, 2019 Oil on canvas 84 x 72 inches 213.4 x 182.9 cm

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Goodbye Dragonfly, 2019

Oil on canvas 84 x 144 inches 213.4 x 365.8 cm

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Rabbit, 2019 Oil on canvas 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

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The Beach, 2019 Oil on canvas 72 x 60 inches 182.9 x 152.4 cm

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Booklovers, 2019 Oil on canvas 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

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TOMORY DODGE Born in Denver, CO in 1974 Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

2012 ACME., Los Angeles, CA Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Zuoz, Switzerland

EDUCATION

2011 CRG Gallery, New York, NY

2004 MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA

2010 Alison Jacques Gallery, London, United Kingdom

1998 BFA, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI

2009 “Works on Paper,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY “After Forever,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA

1997 European Honors Program, Rhode Island School of Design, Rome, Italy SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2018 Lux Art Institute, Encinitas, CA Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles, CA 2017 “Deep Sleep,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY Inman Gallery, Houston, TX 2015 “The Outside Therein,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA

2008 CRG Gallery, New York, NY 2007 Alison Jacques Gallery, London, United Kingdom ACME., Los Angeles, CA 2006 Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN CRG Gallery, New York, NY 2004 ACME., Los Angeles, CA Taxter & Spengemann, New York, NY MFA Thesis Exhibition, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA 2003 A402 Gallery, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA

2014 CRG Gallery, New York, NY Alison Jacques Gallery, London, United Kingdom

1999 CORE New Art Space, Denver, CO

2013 ACME., Los Angeles, CA

1998 Pirate Contemporary Arts Oasis, Denver, CO

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GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2019 “Yin/Yang,” O-O LA, Los Angeles, CA 2018 “Belief in Giants,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY “Night Walk,” Inman Gallery, Houston, TX

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2013 “Odd Harmonics,” Judith Charles Gallery, New York, NY “Tomory Dodge & Denyse Thomasos: Directions to a Dirty Place,” Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC

2017 “Color & Pattern,” Pivot Art + Culture, Seattle, WA “Stranger Than Paradise,” Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI

2012 “Pulp2,” Beta Pictoris Gallery, Maus Contemporary, Birmingham, AL “To Live and Paint in LA,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA “Chasm of the Supernova,” Center for the Arts Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, CA

2016 “Tom Friedman (+The Birthday Show),” 1969 Gallery, New York, NY “Passage,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA “I’ll Not Be In Your Damn Ledger,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY “Grafforists,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA “Cult of Color,” Circuit 12, Dallas, TX

2011 “VISIONS: Ali Banisadr, Jules de Balincourt, Tomory Dodge, Barnaby Furnas and Ryan Mosley,” Monica De Cardenas Galleria, Milan, Italy “Works of Paper,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA “Creating the New Century: Contemporary Art from the Dicke Collection,” Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH “Art / Music / Alchemy,” Starkwhite, Auckland, New Zealand

2015 “Lost in a Sea of Red,” The Pit, Glendale, CA “One Foot on the Ground,” James Harris Gallery, Seattle, WA “Mona,” 68 Projects, Berlin, Germany “Remains,” Durden and Ray, Los Angeles, CA

2010 “Inaugural Show,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY “Palm Paintings,” Buchmann Galerie, Berlin, Germany “The Language of Flowers,” CRG Gallery, New York “Library of Babel/In and Out of Place,” Zabludowicz Collection, London, United Kingdom

2014 “An Appetite for Painting,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark “NOW-ISM: Abstraction Today,” Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH “An Appetite for Painting, National Museum of Contemporary Art,” Oslo, Norway “Painters’ Painters,” Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom “INCOGNITO 10,” Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA “20 Years of ACME.,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA

2009 “The Summer Show,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY “Slow Magic,” The Bluecoat, Liverpool, United Kingdom “Opportunities,” BravinLee Programs, New York, NY “Surveillance,” Affirmation Arts, New York, NY 2008 “Art on Paper,” Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC “New Prints 2008/Spring,” International Print Center, New York, NY

“New Prints 2008/Spring,” New York School of Interior Design Gallery, New York, NY “Future Tense: Reshaping the Landscape,” Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY “The Prom – A Survey of Contemporary Painting Strategies,” Lawrimore Project, Seattle, WA “Some Paintings: The Third LA Weekly Annual Biennial,” Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2007 “American Soil,” Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS “Sheldon Survey,” Sheldon Memorial Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE “Fata Morgana,” Galerie Schmidt Maczollek, Cologne, Germany “Tug Boat,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA “Endangered Wasteland,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY 2006 The Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant Recipients, CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY “New Prints 2006/Summer: COLOR,” International Print Center, New York, NY 2005 “Fast Forward: Passion for the New,” House of Campari, Venice, CA “Rogue Wave 2005,” LA Louver, Venice, CA “Evidence,” Inman Gallery, Houston, TX “New View,” Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS 2004 “Super Sonic,” ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA “Singing My Song,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA “Surface Tension,” Lombard Freid Fine Arts, New York, NY “Field Trip,” San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA 2003 “Lordship and Bondage,” LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University, New York, NY

“Art Weird,” Stevenson Blanche Gallery, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA 2002 “Paper Weight,” Stevenson Blanche Gallery, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA 2000 “The Book As Art,” Boulder Public Exhibition Space, Boulder, CO 1998 “Mostra Finale,” Palazzeto di Cenci, Rome, Italy AWARDS 2004 Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, New York, NY SELECT COLLECTIONS Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, NC Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition

TOMORY DODGE 18 April – 24 May 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2019 Christopher Miles

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Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, Los Angeles, CA Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue designed by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-11-3 Cover: Star Man, (detail), 2019

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY