Art / Harry Dodge
- dissolve me + the love between; 2015; plexiglass, MDF, screws, paint, urethane resin, clamp, glue , cardboard; 41″ x 51.5″ x 16″
- Electric Skin/Rat Salad (The Inhuman Is Not What It Used To Be); 2015; plaster, paint, wire, steel alloy tubing, car paint with metallic rainbow flake; 36″ x 27″ x 32″
- My Machine; 2015; paper-coated plywood, Bondo, oil-based enamel paint, steel, concrete, silicone, wood; 25″ x 96″ x 45″
From the artist
:: Account ::
These sculptures are part of a recent body of work presented in a show titled The Cybernetic Fold. The works in the show, which included sculpture, drawings, and video, are ecstatic, dogged reckonings with intellectual preoccupations channeled through the artist’s (my) body— which might here be conceived as a kind of organic filter for insuperable questions wrought by study. (I experience thinking as a full-body joy.) Is the pith of our relation material? How does a die-hard materialist conceptualize, or instantiate, the nature of our relations in a digital age? How might a technophobe—or at least someone who feels acutely the diminishments, wrought by computers, of the analog nuances of human communication—contend with cyborgian reality, or what Paul Preciado has called the ever-accelerating “pharmacopornographic era”? How might flatness—which we confront daily in the form of monitors and smart phones, etc.—be reconsidered? What if flatness didn’t lack? What makes thickness; what makes dimension? What is the thickness of our relation to each other? How does a single bend make volume? If Rosi Braidotti is right, that “The inhuman is not what it used to be,” what is it now, and what are we? What might Georges Bataille’s idea of man as “a particle inserted into unstable and tangled ensembles” look or feel like if materialized into shape; what if these ensembles are not only digital, but also endlessly shaped by interest, love, and shame?
This body of work as a whole is frenetic, lewd, hallucinatory, and visceral, and I hope that it conjures the pulsing, multivalent bodies whose desires drive, and often collide with, machine (not to mention with each other).
Harry Dodge is an American artist, writer and performer whose interdisciplinary practice is characterized by its explorations of materiality, diffraction and profusion. His work has been exhibited at many venues nationally and internationally, including the 2008 Whitney Biennial (NY), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (CT), and Hammer Museum (LA). Dodge’s work is in collections including Museum of Modern Art (NY), Hammer Museum (LA), Museum of Contemporary Art (LA). His most recent exhibition was “The Cybernetic Fold,” at Wallspace, NY.