Art / Harry Dodge

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.