Tomory Dodge
Hair into Gold and Back Again
Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles
7 October - 11 November 2023
Philip Martin Gallery presents, “Hair into Gold and Back Again,” a solo exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist TOMORY DODGE. At a moment in which making a serious abstraction is a difficult task, Tomory Dodge is producing some of the most significant abstract paintings today.
"This new group of paintings is the result of more than a year of working," Tomory Dodge says. Known for repeatedly scraping down and building up his canvas, Tomory Dodge makes works that listen to and collaborate with the painting in order to create, not only a deep sense of pictorial space with a rich sense of color, but also a painterly surface with dynamic active mark-making.
In his new works,Tomory Dodge comments that multiple elements and systems smash together, noting that, "I have long been fascinated by the alchemy of modern image creation having realized as a child that the pictures on my family’s old analog TV set were composed of little dots. Since then, I have been interested in the image in painting on both the 'molecular' and 'macro' levels; how one can show and see both the forest AND the trees at the same time."
If our present moment is one in which past, present and future all seem to exist at once, Tomory Dodge's works in “Hair into Gold and Back Again" embrace the particularities of individual vision as on-going concern. Dodge’s paintings play on the possibilities that pop up when one's individual sensations are broken down into a complex surface of brushstrokes. Tomory Dodge enlists himself and us in the sensorial and intellectual task of navigating an very specific object - a painting - in which image and surface are figured through applied color, stroke direction, line, form and shape.
Tomory Dodge begins many of his paintings with patterns laid in by way of stripes and shapes. "Through optical color mixing, a retinal alchemy is enabled. They vibrate and shimmer if given the chance.” He then pushes this ‘history into the fabric of the canvas, scraping down marks and building them back up, again and again, working back and forth in a "daily practice of painting" in some sense reminiscent of a process Dutch abstractionist master Willem De Kooning described with regard to a picture, "I am working for weeks and weeks on end on a large picture and have to keep the paint wet so that I can change it over and over, I mean, do the same thing over and over.”
"Intimate connection of some kind with others is the best art can ever aspire to I think and, in the case of this work," Tomory Dodge writes, "it may be accomplished through a kind of undoing. Whether it’s the implied undoing of the additive synthesis of the electronic image. or the actual undoing of the subtractive synthesis in the painting.“ Part of what makes Dodge's abstractions so vital is the sincere way in which they wear the energy of the past while at the same time engaging with the complexities of the present moment. Dodge engages us in a conversation that elicits our knowledge of Abstract Expressionism's all-over picture plane, the High Modernism of Larry Poons, the horizon lines of Richard Diebenkorn, the patterns of Howardena Pindell, and the transgressions of Gerhard Richter. Generation X is now old enough to know its children and its aging parents; old enough to know the analog mediums of the past and the digital mediums that stand in for them today; old enough to know the world both before and after smart phones and the algorithms of Big Data.
"That said," Tomory Dodge writes, "that is not really what these paintings are. While they may evoke and be seen to respond to the ubiquity of the electronic image, they do not exist within that continuum of pixel through to the illusion. These paintings are better explained as filters upon filters, layers upon layers, painted over and over and over. They are a continuous goodbye, a forever letting go.”
TOMORY DODGE (b. 1974, Denver, CO) received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI) and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA) in 2004. Tomory Dodge was recently featured in the exhibition, "Pocket Universe" (Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA). Recent solo exhibitions include Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Miles McEnery Gallery (New York, NY); LUX Art Institute (Encinitas, CA); "Stranger Than Paradise," Rhode Island School of Design Museum (Providence, RI); "Grafforists," Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA); "Nowism," Pizzuti Collection (Columbus, OH); "An Appetite For Painting," National Museum (Oslo, Norway); "Pouring It On," Herter Art Gallery, University of Massachusetts (Amherst, MA); "Tomory Dodge and Denise Thomasos: Directions to a Dirty Place," Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (Winston-Salem, NC); "Future Tense: Reshaping the Landscape," Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, NY); "American Soil," Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS); "Sheldon Survey," Sheldon Memorial Gallery, University of Nebraska (Lincoln, NE). His work is in the collections of such museums as Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA); Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach, CA); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, (San Francisco, CA); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA); Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA); Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX); Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS); Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis, MN); Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis, MN); Orlando Museum of Art (Orlando, FL); Knoxville Museum of Art (Knoxville, TN); Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (Birmingham, AL); Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC); Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC); RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI); Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT); and Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY). Dodge's work is the subject of several monographic catalogs and has been discussed in such publications as Artforum, Flash Art, Modern Painters, Art Review, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. Tomory Dodge lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
PHILIP MARTIN GALLERY
3342 Verdugo Road, Los Angeles, CA 90065
