Everyday Animals | Ulterior Gallery
William Eric Brown, Michelle Brandemuehl, Keiko Narahashi, and Sarah TortoraCurated by Alex DodgeDecember 14, 2019 – January 18, 2020Opening Reception: Saturday, December 14, 6– 8pmULTERIOR GALLERY172 Attorney St. New York, NY 10002Everyday Animals are reliable animals. Our dogs, our cats. They are part of our daily lives; they are part of us. Normally they are predictable animals, but sometimes they are not.In 2005 a woman in France named Isabelle had a black lab named Tania whom she loved very much. One day Isabelle became unconscious after taking too many sleeping pills. While her owner lay motionless, Tania mauled Isabelle’s face so badly that she would become the world’s first face transplant recipient. It’s still unclear if Tania intended her owner any harm or if she was desperately trying to wake her from her drug-induced state. Tania was euthanized and in 2016 Isabelle would succumb to complications from her experimental surgery.In the same year lived a couple in the United States whose marriage, which appeared on the surface to be stable if not a reluctantly loving one, was actually falling apart. The husband, then already out of work for a number of years, became sedentary, spending hours each day online while his wife worked menial jobs to make ends meet. They grew apart while going through the daily motions. One day the husband noticed a stray cat in their backyard and began feeding it daily. Aside from a uniquely eccentric meow, the cat seemed well groomed and by all accounts was an inside cat that had lost its way. Against the wife’s better judgment she deferred and the couple brought the cat into their house. Within days the cat began to wreak havoc; soiling the carpet, clawing the upholstery, even attacking the wife. It became clear that this was definitely an outside cat, but the husband refused to let it go. The cat became the source of bitter arguments and after nearly four years, with the house in ruins, the couple seemed on the brink of divorce.When thinking about art we often consider context to be one of the more important if not the most important factors in shaping its meaning and function. We adhere to the myths of singular or binary transformative admixtures: An object is taken out of its typical setting and placed into an unfamiliar one and voila—urinal becomes fountain. On one level that IS happening, but the more complicated reality is that an artwork, like all things, is a complex system. It is no easier to understand than are the stories about the dog and the cat, but multivariate non-linear relationships are hard to comprehend so we simplify them because heuristics are our specialty and things that don’t fit them are scary. It’s often hard for us to accept that action, intention, and context all feedback on each other in unpredictable ways that are co-transformative. What we are often left to confront is not what it seems at first. It has been argued that this is becoming more apparent in our current culture and we struggle to adapt, what’s often referred to as The Great Weirding. We are at a place that requires new tools of understanding.Everyday Animals explores how four artists’ use of seemingly everyday materials, forms, and gestures become anything but easy to define. In William Eric Brown’s bronze casts of manipulated cardboard and foam core, one is at first reminded of Twombly’s bronzes often derived from similar materials. Somehow Brown’s feel closer to the original that they were cast from in their detail and fidelity yet shifted ever so slightly out of tune and into a new kind of presence; both physical and virtual / elevated and lowered. Keiko Narahashi’s embrace of ceramics in recent years meanders tactfully between playful, functional, and serious formal investigation, occupying these dimensions simultaneously and unapologetically. Michelle Brandemuehl’s works pair a hyperconscious use of spray paint marking and minimal geometric reconfiguration. The signature flurry overspray is dissected to reveal something quietly poetic and previously unnoticed through the razor-sharp edges of a sliding tile puzzle. Sarah Tortora’s painted wood forms appear nearly algorithmic in origin or perhaps key-like as a final component that completes a system beyond our comprehension.Everyday Animals are not always Easy Animals. Sometimes they are Complicated Animals.
Driving Forces | Columbus Museum of Art
Work included in Driving ForcesOn view at PCCMA 10.26.19 – 3.8.20On view at CMA 11.1.19 – 2.2.20As artists respond to the world around them, their creations become social and cultural forces in their own right. With work by more than 75 artists from more than 20 different countries, Driving Forces: Contemporary Art from the Collection of Ann and Ron Pizzuti features a wide-range of work that not only responds to, but helps shape contemporary culture. Work by artists who influenced the direction of twentieth-century art, such as Frank Stella and Susan Rothenberg, are joined by others who are helping to define what art means in the twenty-first century, including Nick Cave, Deana Lawson, Zanele Muholi, and Zhang Huan, among many others. With this array of inter-generational and international artists, the exhibition opens up a conversation around a range of contemporary artistic and cultural issues.Member Preview for Driving Forces: Contemporary Art from the Collection of Ann and Ron Pizzuti and Object/Set: Gauri Gill’s Acts of Appearance10.31.19, 6:00 PM-8:30 PMColumbus Museum of ArtJoin us for an exclusive member preview of two stunning exhibitions: Driving Forces: Contemporary Art from the Collection of Ann and Ron Pizzuti and Object/Set: Gauri Gill’s Acts of Appearance. Members are invited to celebrate these special shows at CMA with an evening reception, gallery preview, and exhibition talks.6:30 PM Conversation with Columbus collector Neil Rector and William and Sarah Ross Soter Associate Curator of Photography Anna Lee7:15 PM Conversation with Guest Curator Rebecca Ibel and Pizzuti Family Curator of Contemporary Art Tyler Cann
Comfort House | Tokyo Art Book Fair 2019
A new artist edition "Comfort House" will be available at the 2019
through
. The fair will take place at
The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
from July 12 - 15, 2019.
Comfort House, 2019
Suite of 5 laser-cut inkjet and toner print collages on paper, embossed folio, picture frame, screen-printed dust jacket, and colophon.27 x 34 x 6 cm (box), 23 x 30.5 cm (each collage)Edition of 10
The algorithm and painting semi-skilled: Notes for an exhibition | Journal of Contemporary Painting
Included in:Journal of Contemporary PaintingVolume 5, Number 1The algorithm and painting semi-skilled: Notes for an exhibitionAuthors: Chris ReitzPage: 177-194DOI: 10.1386/jcp.5.1.177_1Abstract:When Gabriel Orozco began painting in the mid-2000s he did so via a turn to non-compositional strategies of making – to painting by algorithm, on the one hand, and painting by appropriation on the other. Work in this vein included his rule-based ‘Samurai Tree’ series and a series of pixelated images he calls the ‘Particle Paintings’. This turn in Orozco’s practice served as the point of departure for an exhibition investigating the legacy of modernist painting techniques in artwork articulated in and through digital and computer technology. In addition to two works by Orozco (Pollock’s Drip Grid, 2011, a pixelated detail of Jackson Pollock’s Number 8, 1949, and an animation from his ‘Samurai Tree’ series), the exhibition featured work by six contemporary artists, all of which were produced in the last year. Orozco’s work, the oldest in the show, set the terms of the investigation and provided a critically established frame for the otherwise brand new work on display. This article describes the dual art historical stakes – deskilled non-compositional modernist strategies and reskilled computer art – of the exhibition that resulted.Full article available here.
この春の日本を彩る、美しく先鋭的な絵画たち。| BRUTUS
Featured in the April 2019 issue of BRUTUSこの春の日本を彩る、美しく先鋭的な絵画たち。By Mami Hidaka
Alex Dodge: The Trauma of Information | METROPOLIS
ALEX DODGE: THE TRAUMA OF INFORMATION
Traditional Japanese techniques revived in tandem with modern tools
BY CAROLINE PERRINE | POSTED ON FEBRUARY 20, 2019
Ahead of Art Fair Tokyo 2019, Metropolis reached out to Alex Dodge, who will be exhibiting in partnership with Maki Fine Arts in the Projects space. Dodge’s work is included in a number of private collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and The New York Public Library. He will be exhibiting in Maki Fine Arts beginning on March 23.
Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018 | Whitney Museum of American Art, NY
Sep 28, 2018–Apr 14, 2019
(Work by Alex Dodge will be included in this group exhibition)
Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018 establishes connections between works of art based on instructions, spanning over fifty years of conceptual, video, and computational art. The pieces in the exhibition are all “programmed” using instructions, sets of rules, and code, but they also address the use of programming in their creation. The exhibition links two strands of artistic exploration: the first examines the program as instructions, rules, and algorithms with a focus on conceptual art practices and their emphasis on ideas as the driving force behind the art; the second strand engages with the use of instructions and algorithms to manipulate the TV program, its apparatus, and signals or image sequences. Featuring works drawn from the Whitney’s collection, Programmed looks back at predecessors of computational art and shows how the ideas addressed in those earlier works have evolved in contemporary artistic practices. At a time when our world is increasingly driven by automated systems, Programmed traces how rules and instructions in art have both responded to and been shaped by technologies, resulting in profound changes to our image culture.
The exhibition is organized by Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of Digital Art, and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Melva Bucksbaum Associate Director for Conservation and Research, with Clémence White, curatorial assistant.
Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018 is sponsored by AudiMajor support is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.Significant support is provided by the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation and the Korea Foundation.Generous support is provided by the Jon and Mary Shirley Foundation.Additional support is provided by Hearst.In-kind support is provided by the Hakuta Family.
Whisper In My Ear and Tell Me Softly | Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, NY
A solo exhibition at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York: Sept 7 through Oct 14th, 2018Opening Reception: Sept. 7th (6-8pm)For more information contact the gallery.
INTERchange Talk | Brooklyn Research
INTERchange - Alex Dodge: Painting In and Out of Virtual SpacesApril 4th, 2018 - 7pmBrooklyn Research is proud to present INTERchange, an ongoing series featuring artists working at the intersection of physical and virtual spaces. Through artist talks, discussions, and media we explore how new technologies inform and extend creative practice. We live in a world increasingly stratified by virtual layers of social, political, and economic culture. INTERchange hopes to understand how virtual and physical spaces are synthesized into new cultural formsOur first season starts with artist and Brooklyn Research co-founder Alex Dodge.Join us April 4th for the series keynote and opening talk “Painting In and Out of Virtual Spaces”.Dodge’s studio practice has consistently explored the promise of technology as it interacts with and shapes human experience. His work finds a ground between new media and traditional painting.Alex Dodge lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. He is the recipient of the 2016 Japan U.S. Friendship Commission Creative Artist Exchange Fellowship. He holds degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA) and the New York University Interactive Telecommunication Program (MPS).
NADA New York 2018
Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery will present new work at NADA New York .
NADA New YorkMarch 8–11, 2018Booth 2.05Skylight Clarkson Sq550 Washington StreetVIP Preview by Invitation:Thursday, March 8, 10am–2pmOpen to the Public:Thursday, March 8, 2–8pmFriday, March 9 12–8pmSaturday, March 10, 12–8pmSunday, March 11, 12–6pmFor inquiries please call 212-594-0883 or email info@newartdealers.org
In Conversation with Glen Baldridge and Alex Dodge at the Pizzuti Collection
02/22/20186:30 pm - 7:30 pm Join the Pizzuti Collection for a conversation between Glen Baldridge and Alex Dodge as they discuss their work, their friendship, and the Pair exhibition.Pair: Glen Baldridge and Alex Dodge is the inaugural edition of what will be a series of exhibitions juxtaposing two artists from the Pizzuti Collection. The artists experiment sharply and slyly with materials and technology. Over thirty paintings, photographs, prints, and drawings created over the past decade are currently on view through April 28, 2018.This event is included with general admission and is free to members and students. Visitors are welcome to explore all three floors of the exhibition before and after the event.
Alex Dodge | Deep Color Podcast
Alex Dodge - Episode 30JANUARY 16, 2018DEEP COLOR is an oral history project and podcast series that features insightful conversations with visual artists as they discuss their work and lives--offering listeners a unique understanding about the experiences and people behind the artwork. Each episode is long-form at about 1 hour in length, forthright and unscripted.Alex Dodge makes vibrant oil paintings that rely on technology and printmaking techniques. Alex talks about his multi-layered process, building his own tools, virtual and physical spaces, patterns, balancing control and chance, and a desire to make physical objects that endure.Listen Here or on iTunes
Exhibit highlights abstract artist’s early work, which captivated collector | The Columbus Dispatch
Also on view at the Pizzuti Collection is a two-person exhibit showcasing New York artists Glen Baldridge and Alex Dodge. Besides sharing the same year of birth (1977) and alma mater (the Rhode Island School of Design), the two produce pieces with sometimes-striking overlaps.Pop culture is referenced in Dodge’s oil-and-glass-beads-on-linen work “MJ,” in which the sequin-gloved hand of pop star Michael Jackson emerges from beneath an object shrouded in a colorful quilt. Similarly, Baldridge’s woodcut “Double Dilly” features commercial imagery, positioning a pair of Dairy Queen logos beside each other like watchful eyes.Also notable are Baldridge’s screen print “Lucky Sevens,” presenting what appear to be images of advertisements for caskets; and Dodge’s oil-on-canvas “Monument,” in which a red-and-white polka-dotted sheet covers a bulging object that oozes a thick yellow mass.The trio of Stella, Baldridge and Dodge make for two of the season’s most memorable exhibits.Read the full article here.
Gallery spotlight: paper carries weight at Pizzuti Collection | The Lantern
Gallery spotlight: paper carries weight at Pizzuti CollectionBy Sydney Riddle
“Pair” is the first exhibition of a new series, Pagano said. The idea is to start a conversation by placing two artists in the same exhibition, in this case Dodge and Baldridge, whose work Ron Pizzuti has been collecting since 2005. Both are graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design and share a studio space together in New York.Both artists work in multiple disciplines between new media and fine art. Dodge explores technology as it interacts with and shapes human experience, while Baldridge focuses more on the unseen, peering into remote and unknown places at the edge of society and nature.“Alex and I both have a fluid approach to using process and technology to achieve various conceptual and/or aesthetic effects,” Baldridge said in an email.Pagano said she decided to pair these two artists together due to their multidisciplinary approach such as printmaking, photography and scratch-off ink, as well as their humorous commentary on today’s culture of consumerism, environmental and political issues and the daily overloads of information created by modern technology.“Seeing 12 years of work from Glen and I chronicled side by side is not only moving on a personal level, looking back on the years, but it also paints a picture of how the world has changed,” Dodge said in an email.Elements of the artwork include a variety of ideas and themes. For example, the gallery features Dodge’s paintings of the American flag draped over hidden objects and Baldridge’s boards decorated with bullet hole decals spelling out “The End’s Not Near, It’s Here’” and “Two Days Before The Day After Tomorrow.”The Pizzuti Collection is located at 632 North Park St. and is free to members, $12 for adults and $10 for senior citizens. The gallery is open Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m.Read more here
Pair: Alex Dodge & Glen Baldridge | Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH
Pair: Alex Dodge & Glen BaldridgeNovember 17, 2017 - April 28, 2018Pair: Glen Baldridge and Alex Dodge is the inaugural edition in what will be a series of exhibitions juxtaposing two artists from the Pizzuti Collection. Pair as a concept might be two works next to one another on a wall, or it could be, as with this edition, the linking and connecting of over thirty paintings, photographs, and prints by two artists. Such an effort is part of the mystical project of collections and museums: placing objects together with the idea that their proximity will cause a reaction. The observation of relationships will generate a scintillating friction of ideas.Glen Baldridge (b. 1977 in Nashville, Tennessee) and Alex Dodge (b. 1977 in Denver, Colorado) were selected as the first Pair for myriad reasons: the Pizzuti Collection includes works from over a decade of their making, collected because of the Pizzuti’s interest in their respective projects coupled with the desire to gather a body of work in depth and over time. Baldridge and Dodge both attended Rhode Island School of Design, Baldridge graduating with a BFA in Printmaking and Dodge with a BFA in Painting. The early Aughts brought them together at CRG Gallery in New York (first as preparators and then as co-directors) where they collaborated on expanding the roster of artists and introducing print editions and video series. They share a studio space in New York and are both represented by Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery.While their projects exist independently of each other, as Dodge describes, “there is a persistent undercurrent that connects it, at times through process, but consistently through our shared tendency to waver into murky darkness continually surfacing through humor.” Their paths have led them in their separate but adjacent ways to experiment sharply and slyly. They have adopted the images of our shared contemporary consumer and visual culture (we see Dairy Queen logos, IPhones, Michael Jackson’s glove, dollar bills) to comment on technology’s promises and perils, political and environmental crises, and the uncertainty of interpreting daily tsunamis of information. Using a plethora of traditional printmaking, photographic, and painting techniques but also experimenting with handmade tools, scratch off lotto ink, 3D modeling and computer programming, Baldridge and Dodge show us their version of our anxious and wondrous present moment mixed with levity and mirth.The centerpiece of the exhibition, and an especially piquant example of the mingling of complex processes, is on view in the pairing of Baldridge’s pyrogravure of a deer in the forest and Dodge’s two reduction collages of draped forms. They are curious and materially compelling depictions of things that require an unfolding exercise of looking and exploring in order to get at what we see. In Untitled, a deer in the forest is blithely unaware of the hunting camera capturing its meandering, the shutter triggered by the deer’s own movement. Baldridge laser cut the image into a wood panel and created a print with only the char and burn grabbing at the paper. The blind printing process creates an imprint that pulls us in to ponder its tactile detail. A pervading sense of light in the sepia toned old fashiony-ness of the print pushes us back to absorb the totality of the sylvan quotidian – here memorialized by the animal’s unintentional “selfie”.The two parts of Sexual Awakenings have an equally laborious and curious origin. Similar to many recent compositions, Dodge creates a computer rendering of a textile draped over objects, which then undergoes a process of translation from the virtual to the physical. Here the computer image is made two-dimensional and carved into paperboard. Part I shows a veiled structure with an obscured form that could be bodies intertwined. In Part II the sheet is partially pulled away, showing what Dodge explains is, “a system of self-assembling structures … a molecular sex or the process of molecular union or the creation of new forms through the self-assembly of basic constituent parts.” The mysterious and suggestive image is revealed as a geometric structure which speaks to Dodge’s larger project of addressing those intersections between human behavior and technology and our assumptions about what we think we know and how we understand what we see. There is something of the darkly concealed threading throughout Pair, as if whatever Baldridge and Dodge are making, it is always about the partly hidden, the inside joke, or the troubled underbelly of a system. They hint at alienation, deception, and the construction of ideas that are more fiction than fact. Their photogravures of apparition-filled forest glens or paintings of American Flags covering undisclosed volumes speaks to our moment when it is difficult to establish the definition of the truth, especially when “Post-Truth” is the 2016 word of the year and “alternative facts” is bandied about as a valid epistemological concept. The work in Pair, cleverly and across media, asks that we slow down, stand back, and make it our collective project to question what we see and think about the meanings and messages in our image saturated world.
Fine Arts: Entrepreneurship and the Creative Economy | Pratt Institute
Monday, October 23 • 5:30 – 7:30 pmStueben GalleryPratt Institute200 Willoughby AvenueBrooklyn, NY 11205
PDF Invite
Adjunct Faculty | Rhode Island School of Design
Alex Dodge will begin an adjunct faculty position this Fall semester (2017) at The Rhode Island School of Design. He will be teaching a Digital Tools for Artists class in the Painting Department for Senior level undergraduate painting students.
The Infallibility of Lies | HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY, East Hampton, NY
Alex Dodge "The Infallibility of Lies"May 20th - June 11th, 2017Halsey Mckay Gallery79 Newtown LaneEast Hampton, NY 11937
OCR Friday with Alex Dodge | Office for Creative Research
Welcome to OCR Friday: our studio's salon-style gathering featuring an individual or group working at the intersections of data, research-based art, and creative methodologies.Tonight's talk is by visual artist Alex Dodge who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His studio practice has consistently explored the promise of technology as it interacts with and shapes human experience. His work is deftly located between new media and traditional fine art disciplines including painting, printmaking, and sculpture. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. He holds degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA Painting) and New York University, Interactive Telecommunication Program (MPS). He is also a co-founder of Brooklyn Research, a co-working space and consultancy in Brooklyn.Refreshments will be served. If for some reason you cannot attend, kindly let us know.RSVP here.