Tomory Dodge @ Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC

Tomory Dodge
Miles McEnery Gallery, New York
18 April - 24 May 2019

TOMORY DODGE

Rabbit, 2019

Oil on canvas

60 x 48 inches, 152.4 x 121.9 cm 

© Tomory Dodge, Courtesy Miles McEnery Gallery, New York

MILES MCENERY GALLERY presents an inaugural solo exhibition of new paintings by TOMORY DODGE, at 525 West 22nd Street. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Christopher Miles.

Tomory Dodge’s new paintings are dynamic, liminal, and constantly in flux. In this new body of work, Tomory Dodge continues to explore concepts of transition by continuously building, destroying, and transforming layers of thick oil paint with fluid brushstrokes. His works depict irregular shapes and clashing planes that coalesce into compositions of organized chaos, challenging viewers to reflect on the process and meaning of picture-making.

The paintings on view show the making of a painting, its transformations, discoveries, and ultimately its arrival. Emphasizing on the idea that painting has somewhere to go in the modern world, just like it did before, Tomory Dodge approaches each work with an open mind. First, he sees the paint itself, its application, texture, color, and thickness. Second, he observes the representations–abstract and figurative–that the paint naturally makes. Through a process of experimentation and transformation, the artist’s practice consists of finding the painting within a painting by creating a large composition of smaller paintings all together.

Tomory Dodge’s process contains duality that is instinctual yet focused on the physicality of paint and the process of painting. Using non- deciphering titles, he creates opportunities to experiment in numerous ways, including negative and positive space, and pattern. In one single image, the artist calls into question boundaries, fluidity of content and content’s inseparability from form. As Christopher Miles says, “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.”

Christopher Miles also notes, “Dodge’s paintings establish agency–made by the 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.”

TOMORY DODGE (b. 1974 in Denver, CO) received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1998 from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI, and his Master of Fine Arts degree in 2004 from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA. He also completed the Rhode Island School of Design European Honors Program in Rome, Italy in 1997.

Recent solo exhibitions include Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Lux Art Institute, Encinitas, CA (2018); Cherry and Martin (2018); CRG Gallery, New York, NY (2017, 2014, 2011); Inman Gallery, Houston, TX (2017); ACME., Los Angeles, CA (2015, 2013, 2012); Alison Jacques Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2014, 2010); and Monica De Cardenas Galleria, Zuoz, Switzerland (2012). Recent group exhibitions include “Yin/Yang,” O-O L A, Los Angeles, CA; “Belief in Giants,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “Color & Pattern,” Pivot Art + Culture, Seattle, WA; “Stranger Than Paradise,” Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI; “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; “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; “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; “INCOGNI TO 10, ” Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA; “20 Years of ACME.,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA; “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; “Pulp2,” Beta Pictoris Gallery, Maus Contemporary, Birmingham, AL; “To Live and Paint in LA,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, C A; and “Chasm of the Supernova, ” Center for the Arts Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, CA .

His artworks are included in the permanent collections of 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; RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, NC; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

Tomory Dodge lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

MILES MCENERY GALLERY
525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
www.milesmcenery.com