Alex Dodge and Tom LaDuke

ALEX DODGE TOM LADUKE

ALEX DODGE TOM LADUKE MILES McENERY GALLERY

ALEX DODGE TOM LADUKE WE CONTAIN MULTITUDES

511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

515 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

SHADOW PLAY

By Evan Moffitt

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The history of painting is a tale of truths about lies, an account of the tricks a brush can play on our perception. In his Republic, Plato claimed that all representations were like shadows on a cave wall, as if he were aware that the oldest paintings were made by firelight in grottoes. He believed art to be an illusion from which philosophy had to turn its head in order to fully grasp the natural world in the light of day. Two millennia later, photography, “the pencil of nature,”1 supplanted the human hand with the eye of a machine, reversing this dialectic of truth and representation.

Technology now tells us lies about truths: it promotes impossible ideals to which we aspire and encourages real bodies to become simulacra. Painting in this post-photography, post-digital age is a kind of shadow turned back on itself, an exploration of the anatomy of illusionism. It is neither a play of truth nor of falsehood, but a distorted mirror in which we might better see how we see ourselves.

Few painters appear to be as different as Alex Dodge and Tom LaDuke. Dodge’s crisply rendered, rumpled patterns, stenciled so that they acquire the texture of their referent fabrics, have a unique physical presence that invites our touch. By contrast, LaDuke’s juxtaposition of abstract gestures—some brushed impasto, others poured or stenciled—atop foggy, inscrutable landscapes seem to place the physical world just out of reach, as if behind a pane of steamed glass. Both painters, however, achieve their results through a precise methodology that filters the material through the digital and then back out onto the analog surface of a canvas. Much of their work develops in the virtual space of Blender, a 3D computer graphics software program that synthesizes drawings and provides the tools to distort them. The results are images that the human mind cannot readily imagine, but can nonetheless understand when laid out in these paintings.

1. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, 1844

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public. They are the spaces with which contemporary painting must contend. And so, hung within the white cube, LaDuke’s gallery paintings address what the critic George W.S. Trow called “the context of no context,” as if holding up a mirror to the void. Painterly gestures emerge atop this ethereally dissolving architecture, seemingly suspended in midair. It’s a trick that presages augmented reality while translating its ghostly illusionism to a much older technology.

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Tom LaDuke Self-Inflicted Burden, 2004 Mixed media Height: 34 1/2 inches (87.63 cm) Photo: Brian Forrest, Los Angeles, CA

The hazy vistas of Tom LaDuke’s paintings are inspired by both interiority and the landscape of Southern California, where the artist lives and works. Highway views at dawn or dusk through a windshield clouded by sea mist or body heat, they are not portraits of a place so much as evocations of its lonely yet serene affective charge. In earlier works, LaDuke placed iconic images of California conceptualism behind this signature scrim. The sculpture Self-Inflicted Burden (2004), for instance, features a photorealistic rendering of Chris Burden’s 1971 performance piece Shoot with a sculptural form that incorporates the figure holding a gun. More recently, LaDuke has returned to the scene of the mediated crime, rendering specific contemporary art galleries as the unstable grounds for his surface abstractions. See, for instance, in all the whispers between us (2022), how the original layers of vast, anonymous space with whitewashed walls, skylights, and track lighting has been suddenly riven by a seismic crack, while a disembodied head, like a phantasmal viewer, emerges from the vengeful earth. Galleries, LaDuke says, “are bizarre chapels of commerce,” often cold and empty, always quiet, simultaneously private yet

Alex Dodge also layers his work prodigiously; distorted patterns that appear to be uniform from a distance are revealed to consist of alternating textures and depths when viewed up close. He began working with 3D simulations in 2001 by photographing images inside a swimming pool, reworking them with software to remove the blur of water on the camera lens, and then translating the images into paintings. Now, Dodge alters his own drawings with the software, so that his process begins and ends with his own hand. His forms often resemble objects swaddled in richly variegated textiles, with each fold offering a different transformation of the original pattern. The manipulation of drapery in art goes back at least to the Renaissance, and as the cultural theorist Mieke Bal has suggested, folds are a sensual topology upon which the imagination runs wild.

Dodge describes his fabrics as “leaky,” and indeed their rugous surfaces extrude paint beyond the flat canvas in a kind of controlled impasto. In this exhibition, the high-pile texture of fringe upholstery and teddy bear fur contrast markedly with the smooth, spray-painted gradients behind each figure, inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e. Woodblock prints which flourished in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, ukiyo-e were translated as “pictures of the floating world,” depicting fantasies for the viewing pleasure of Japan’s mercantile class. The combination of their rich patterns with perspectival distortion directly influenced European Impressionist painters. Dodge, appropriately, has used both techniques to render a kind of bourgeois fever dream: plush toys come to life only to glue themselves, zombie-like, to their iPhone screens.

Plato’s aim was not to exchange representation for reality, but to go further toward an understanding of ideal forms. These forms were perfect versions of the things we perceive in

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our lives, objectives toward which we might endeavor. Plato believed that forms really existed, but they had no demonstrable presence until the invention of photography. That technology trained the human eye to see like a machine, allowing artists to picture perfect things as if they were perfectly real. Painting had to give up the ghost or else dramatically augment its vision. The computer software that Dodge and LaDuke use enables them to pick up a two-dimensional image and unlock infinite aspects upon which they may expand. “When it enters a digital space,” notes Dodge, the image “takes up a life of its own.” The results, however, are wildly different. LaDuke’s architectural paintings are so sprawling that their edges can be impossible to ascertain. Dodge’s work, by contrast, takes a more focal approach, with small objects foregrounded to attract close attention. Theirs is the difference between a broad, atmospheric view and a microscopic lens, between the psychological distance of being lost in space and the alienation of watching something familiar become suddenly strange.

are cast and how we can distinguish them from the old ones. It’s a way of severing the chain without casting it off altogether.

Dodge seems to acknowledge this in Each Day a New Beginning (After K. Zucker) (2022): A striped bomber jacket is draped over the back of a folding chair, at what could be a vacant Alcoholics Anonymous meeting room. The jacket is embroidered with a phrase, “The only stars are in your eyes,” and on its sleeve an American flag patch has been emptied of its constellation: a touch of political critique or, perhaps, an acknowledgment that this painting, like all others, is in the eye of the beholder. To have stars in your eyes—to have optimism about the future—isn’t a matter of sorting truth from lies, but rather of finding purpose in both. “The work is a mirror, and what you put into it reflects back,” says LaDuke. In it, we might see ourselves looking clearly.

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Despite their use of digital technology, both painters are insistent on the physicality of their work. “If the tether between virtual and physical is cut,” Dodge argues, “you end up in a disparate space that lends itself to exploitation.” “A physical viewer requires a physical object” such as a painting, LaDuke adds. “Right now, I love that we’re constantly having to creatively keep up with a shifting world, and the physical form of painting allows you a timescale that is not shifting as rapidly.” For all its algorithmic volatility, the Internet lends only an appearance of newness to its endless recirculation of existing imagery. The mediated forms of Dodge’s and LaDuke’s paintings, by contrast, are both flat and three-dimensional when viewed in the flesh. They change from every angle, becoming new each time one looks at them.

Whereas the subjects in Plato’s allegory were forcibly imprisoned in their cave, our world of contemporary shadows is what the novelist William Gibson called a “consensual hallucination.”

We willingly chain ourselves to our screens. By translating simulated images back into physical forms, LaDuke and Dodge provide a more developed understanding of how these new shadows

Evan Moffitt is a writer, editor, and critic based in New York. His work appears often in Artforum, ArtReview, Aperture, and Frieze, where he was formerly the Senior Editor. He is also the creator and host of “Precious Cargo,” a podcast about the way art travels, which will launch on Art& in April 2022.

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ALEX DODGE

Each Day A New Beginning (After K. Zucker), 2022 Oil and acrylic on canvas 48 x 36 inches 121.9 x 91.4 cm

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ALEX DODGE

Feelings the Elephant, 2022

Oil and acrylic on canvas 53 3/4 x 71 3/4 inches 136.5 x 182.2 cm

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ALEX DODGE

Nigel, Awakening From the Meaning Crisis (After JV), 2022

Oil and acrylic on canvas 36 x 48 inches 91.4 x 121.9 cm

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ALEX DODGE

Nigel, Infinite Recursion (NaN), 2022

Oil and acrylic on canvas 48 x 36 inches 121.9 x 91.4 cm

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ALEX DODGE

Self Driving Cars, 2022 Oil and acrylic on canvas 36 x 48 inches 91.4 x 121.9 cm

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TOM LADUKE

a fools warning, 2022 Acrylic on canvas over panel 16 x 15 1/2 inches 40.6 x 39.4 cm

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TOM LADUKE

all the whispers between us, 2022 Acrylic on canvas over panel 57 1/8 x 75 1/4 inches 145 x 191 cm

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TOM LADUKE

neither the light nor the dunk of stone, 2022 Acrylic on canvas over panel 35 1/2 x 47 3/4 inches 90.2 x 121.3 cm

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TOM LADUKE

snowglobe, 2022

Acrylic on canvas over panel 30 3/4 x 30 3/4 inches 78 x 78 cm

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TOM LADUKE

the new gods, 2022

Acrylic on canvas over panel 23 5/8 x 19 inches 60 x 48.3 cm

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TOM LADUKE

the pit in the hole, 2022 Acrylic on canvas over panel 55 1/2 x 68 1/2 inches 141 x 174 cm

ALEX DODGE & TOM LADUKE: WE CONTAIN MULTITUDES New York City, Los Angeles and Tokyo, Spring 2022

ALEX DODGE: I am in Tokyo but it’s very much on the farthest Western outskirts. We are on the edge of the mountains. Mount Takao is right next door to us.

TOM LADUKE: I’ve got the Hollywood sign right here.

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AD: The images look amazing, Tom. TLD: The background work is really delicate on that tree and it was fun to block it over with the rainbow like that.

The tree trunk relates to the Cosimo painting The Discovery of Honey by Bacchus (circa 1499).

ALEX DODGE: They would call that a mountain in Japan.

TOM LADUKE: Sometimes rainbows show up in the work because I’m a very happy person.

ANASTASIJA JEVTOVIC: I think it’s the first time I have seen you use rainbows. It’s really nice.

Title of Painting, 2018 Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 59 inches 200 x 150 cm

TLD: They have been happening for a while. At first, they were a representation of my wife. She was trying to incorporate a rainbow into a dark drawing, without using any white. I like to get them in traditionally with a paintbrush, even though most people think it’s an airbrush. That’s my little joke to myself. Rainbows are hard to make. They’re beautiful to me.

AJ: Alex, do you think about color palette when you work on the paintings too?

AD: I do a few color variations before I decide, almost like color ways. The part that is laid in sets the palette to a degree. It’s almost a design way of looking at it. The iterative aspects are important to let the work grow from one painting to the next.

TLD: I’ve yet to learn that lesson, I think.

AD: I just learned it a few months ago.

TLD: It’s wisdom to know, in whichever state it’s in, that it is fine, that it is good.

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Piero di Cosimo, The Discovery of Honey by Bacchus, circa 1499, Oil on poplar, 79.2 x 128.4 cm, Worcester Art Museum, MA, Museum Purchase, 1937.76. Image © The Worcester Art Museum

Film Still from Snuggle Commercial, 1985

AD: I’m not like my brother. He is a practicing Buddhist at this point. I have read a lot about Buddhism and I think there is something to the aspect about “the being and having.” The object vs. the process. A healthy process always makes healthy objects. You have to let a lot of things fall by the wayside to make a good process.

TLD: Can I ask you, Alex, where does your character come from? The fuzzy bear one?

TLD: There’s a lot of broken eggs. Definitely.

AD: It probably comes from childhood television and commercials. This is a weird off-brand version of Snuggles the Bear from the fabric softener commercials. That is the stylistic origin. There’s a narrative origin, which is that these are a continuous line of synthetic bipedal animalistic beings.

AD: You have to let go. That’s my Buddhist liturgy.

AJ: Like a synthetic jungle?

AJ: Did you let go of your studio space in New York?

AD: That’s been a really big thing for me, just trying to figure out how to balance being between two places.

New York is very important to me and I can’t fully let go of that.

AD: Yes, a lot of these characters exist in a future or alternate timeline. Feelings the Elephant has a whole narrative behind it, which is that the elephant is a performer in a synthetic circus. She was created to have a deep inner life of feelings but was tragically made so that she’s unable to have any outward emotions.

AJ: Do you think your use of fabric relates to this idea of the synthetic? I feel like it almost evokes it physically in the paintings.

AJ: It creates an atmosphere with almost a surreal, dream-like quality to the painting. You can see it in the painted gallery structures with the light coming through.

AD: Yes, that idea has really evolved. With pattern and textile, I was thinking about the way that a draped piece of cloth describes a form—there is shadow. It is an alternate way of describing form. Through whatever lies underneath, that expressive form can distort the pattern.

The form can echo a feeling or a sense of quality. It’s a way of creating an image that can be very seductive.

There is a surface and tactile aspect to it as well, which is important.

AD: In these massive Chelsea spaces which have these huge white walls, and these vacuous corridors…

TLD: You have to use yourself to negotiate that territory.

You can’t make sense of it all visually, you can’t pinpoint it, but you can feel where you are.

AD: There’s also this deeply introspective aspect to these characters. The dark, brooding aspect of their inner world is even deeper in that way. Your space is adjacent to the way I’ve been thinking. In the sense that you echo through the skylights of your architectural space, but so much is left to this spatial void. It’s only the very essential components that allow for this liminal vacuous space, and it’s almost doing something similar to the way that I use pattern, but on the opposite end of the spectrum.

TLD: I think it’s going to be a cool show to have these two together.

TLD: Thanks for noticing that, that is my favorite part of that all the whispers between us painting.

AD: It’s such a beautiful part of the painting! It’s that one glowing LED ‘EXIT’ just hovering and immediately it’s that dark corridor, but that ‘EXIT’ sign is like—you know exactly where that leads.

TLD: It’s a different world, and it has a sound to it too.

Every one of these spaces generate a specific sound.

AD: I think in the paintings you can feel the echo in that space. I can’t wait to see all the work together.

TLD: I like being lost, it’s one of my favorite parts of doing this. I was painting this little waterfall inside that painting all day long, it was so fun. There’s a little tree to the left of it too. You have to really look at it.

AJ: I noticed some of your compositions are rooted in Flemish Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age painting.

Could you speak a little bit about that?

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Giovanni Battista Cima Da Conegliano, David and Jonathan, circa 1510, Oil on wood, 40.6 x 39.4 cm, National Gallery, London, United Kingdom

Édouard Manet, The Dead Christ with Angels, 1864, Oil on canvas, 179.4 x 149.9 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929. Accession Number: 29.100.51.

Rachel Ruysch, Still life of a thistle between carnations and cornflowers on a mossy forest floor, with butterflies and a cricket, 1683 Oil on canvas, 64.5 x 51 cm. Private Collection

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TLD: The sizes are determined by those original paintings.

It’s almost an unknown way of making something. They are coded in such a way that I can’t understand what’s going on, even if I read about them. The most interesting parts of them are not covered in scholarship. For instance, the little painting of Conegliano’s David and Jonathan with Goliath’s head. He’s walking with a friend on a path, but their expression has nothing to do with this gruesome scene. It’s kind of hilarious. It no longer makes sense.

As far as the Dutch Masters, they render a piece of fruit in a way that you can just about taste it, yet it’s in the perspective of someone who has never looked outside of a tiny little room before. It’s bizarre how they were looking at reality then. Maybe, that was what reality was and what we see now is incorrect. Maybe, space is

arbitrary or maybe, it’s a measurement like anything else.

It is dependent on the minds that see it.

AJ: It is interesting with Ruysch—when you look at her paintings of flowers they are electric in their vibrancy.

The colors look hyperreal. If you look at them today, one could ask, “Is this digital?” Whereas, actually, they were painted in oil. She was a botanist in her lifetime.

TLD: I love her work. There are so many of her paintings that cover the death of things—rotting leaves and things like that. And that she was a woman, it seems kind of impossible because of the time. How did she do that?

Not technically, but how did she withstand all those guys?

I think her energy is in there. It’s powerful in that way. It’s palpable. That’s why I’m excited about painting that one.

AJ: Is there a connection between her and Manet?

TLD: They were both breaking down barriers constantly.

He was never not in trouble. He just got stronger from it.

She must have done the same thing.

AD: That is very true.

TLD: There’s that painting at The Met—The Dead Christ with Angels. It’s a beautiful painting. The way that it’s rendered, if you are standing close to it, the hands look like potatoes, you can’t even tell what it is you are looking at, and then you step back a few feet and it’s more real than real. It’s amazing. I am interested too in how things are represented.

TLD: Alex, I know we’ve talked about it before, what’s perceived as the miracle of the reproduction of something. Like a perfect duplicate. I look at that painting Each Day A New Beginning (After K. Zucker), and those chairs, to me, are as much about that painting as painting.

AD: That has been a new kind of development.

Understanding a new vocabulary for these objects and intermediary space. Those chairs are something I’ve been toying with for over a year. There were different versions of the painting until it was finally realized—the way you were describing the Manet. When you get up close, it’s a flat slab of color with just a little bit of shadow. But from a distance, they read exactly the way they need to read. It’s really something.

TLD: In addition, if I glance at that painting, I hear that chair. It makes a certain sound. Those chairs embody so many things. There’s a history in them.

AD: It relates to a painting that a friend of mine made twenty years ago, that I’ve always thought about. It was very much about AA, and therefore the painting is titled after his painting and references his name Kevin Zucker.

He’s a wonderful artist and one of the people that was instrumental in making me think about digital means.

TLD: Every time you say something I think of five things I want to respond with.

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AD: Thinking about what those chairs mean can also be a metaphor for the conflation of identity in individual vs. group and how those things interconnect in various aspects of our society right now. How do we find identity in group? How does the group support the identity? And how we conflate the two. What does that mean nationally, or globally? That was one reason why I wanted to play with it also that formally, the ring of chairs is a very powerful space.

AJ: It’s brilliant to have you both in conversation. I am so excited for the exhibition to take place.

TLD: We are too.

AD: Very, very much.

TLD: I hope we all get to hang out in New York a little bit.

ALEX DODGE Born in Denver, CO in 1977 Lives and works in Tokyo, Japan and New York, NY

2015 Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery at NADA Miami Beach, Miami Beach, FL 2014 “Artists@Grinnell,” Bucksbaum Center for the Arts, Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA

EDUCATION 2012 MPS, New York University, New York, NY 2001 BFA, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

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2021 “Laundry Day: It All Comes Out in the Wash,” Maki Fine Arts, Tokyo, Japan “Remote Working,” Faro Collection, Tokyo, Japan 2020 Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, NY 2019 “The Trauma of Information,” Maki Fine Art, Tokyo, Japan 2018 “Whisper in My Ear and Tell Me Softly,” Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, NY 2017 “The Infallibility of Lies,” Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY 2016 “Love May Fail, But Courtesy Will Prevail,” Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, NY

2010 “Generative,” Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Brooklyn, NY 2008 “Intelligent Design,” Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Brooklyn, NY 2006 “The Most Beautiful Dreams,” Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2022 “Alex Dodge & Tom LaDuke: We Contain Multitudes,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2021 “Around the World, Around the World” (curated by William Leung), Woaw Gallery, Hong Kong, China “From Morning ‘Til Night, We Should Never Rely on a Single Thing,” Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Ten Years,” Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY “Spirits in the Material World,” Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY “アレックス・ダッジ、末永史尚、長田奈緒,” CADAN Yurakucho, Tokyo, Japan 2020 “Ordinary Objects,” Maki Fine Arts, Tokyo, Japan “Peel from Nature,” Mitsukoshi Contemporary, Tokyo, Japan “Winter Show,” Maki Fine Arts, Tokyo, Japan

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2019 “Driving Forces: Contemporary Art from the Collection of Ann and Ron Pizzuti,” Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH “Pulled in Brooklyn,” IPCNY, New York, NY 2018 “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 2017 “Making Their Mark,” 100 Bogart Street Gallery, Brooklyn, NY “Pair: Glen Baldridge and Alex Dodge,” The Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH “Vanishing Points” (curated by Andrianna Campbell), James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY “Painting in the Network: Algorithm and Appropriation” (curated by Chris Reitz), Cressman Center for Visual Arts, University of Louisville, Louisville, KT

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2016 “Splotch,” Sperone Westwater, New York, NY “Exquisite Corpse,” Planthouse, New York, NY 2013 “Lines and Shapes,” Art Bank Collection, United States Department of State, Washington, D.C. 2012 “Cryptograph: An Exhibition for Alan Turing,” Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS 2010 “Contemporary Prints,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY “Default State Network,” Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY “New New York Publishers,” Frans Masereel Center, Kasterlee, Belgium “Forth Estate: New Editions,” The Re: Institute, Millerton, NY “Recent Editions: Forth Estate and Robert Blackburn,” Sharon Arts Exhibition Gallery, Sharon, NH “Forth Estate Editions: Recent Works,” Frederieke Taylor Gallery, New York, NY

“Default State Network” (curated by Ryan Wallace), Raid Projects, Los Angeles, CA

2001 “Thesis Projects,” Woods Gerry, Providence, RI

2009 “Forth Estate Editions,” Rhode Island School of Design Memorial Hall Gallery, Providence, RI “We’re All Gonna Die” (curated by Ron Keyson), Number 35, New York, NY “HUMAN/NATURE/MACHINE,” Wonderland Art Space, Copenhagen, Denmark “If The Dogs Are Barking,” Artists Space, New York, NY “With Hidden Noise,” David Krut Projects, New York, NY “Human Craters,” BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY “Beyond A Memorable Fancy,” EFA Project Space, NY “Forth Estate Editions,” Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

1999 “Some Of Each,” Win, Providence, RI

2016 The Japan U.S. Friendship Commission Creative Artist Exchange Fellowship, Tokyo, Japan

LECTURES, TALKS AND PODCASTS

2014 Artists@Grinnell, Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA

2021 “Alex Dodge,” The Vance Crowe Podcast, ep. 166, 7 December.

SELECT COLLECTIONS

2008 “Beyond a Memorable Fancy,” EFA Project Space, New York, NY “New Prints: Spring 2008,” International Print Center, New York, NY 2007 “New Prints: Winter 2007,” International Print Center New York, NY “New Prints 2007/Autumn,” Columbia College, Chicago, IL 2006 “Hot off the Press: Prints of 2006 from New York Printshops,” Grolier Club, New York, NY “CRG Presents: Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY “Parallel Projects, Chapter One: a show of pictures,” NYDC, New York, NY “Works on Paper,” Bruno Marina Gallery, New York, NY 2005 “Paper Awesome,” Pigman Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Greater Brooklyn,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY 2004 “Multiples,” Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2019 “The Dynamics of Practice in a Virtual World,” University of Vermont, Burlington, VT “Design Systems International,” The Brooklyn Research Podcast, ep. 2, 5 March.

AWARDS & RESIDENCIES

Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, Stanford, CA Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY 2018 “Vincent Houzé,” The Brooklyn Research Podcast, ep. 1, 13 June.

“Painting In and Out of Virtual Spaces,” Brooklyn Research, Brooklyn, NY Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA “Virtual Spaces & Painting,” University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL New York Public Library, New York, NY “Alex Dodge,” Deep Color Podcast, ep. 30, 16 January.

Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH 2017 “Virtual Spaces & Painting,” Rhode Island School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI Providence, RI “Virtual Spaces & Painting,” Office for Creative Research, Brooklyn, NY Robert Hull Fleming Museum, The University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 2016 Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS “Noise to Signal,” International House of Japan, Tokyo, Japan 2012 “Research as Creative Practice,” New York University, New York, NY 2011 “VALUE: an introduction to market dynamics and cultural agency,” New York University, New York, NY

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

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TOM LADUKE Born in Holyoke, MA, in 1963 Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

EDUCATION

2004 “Pattern Seeking Primate,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2002 “terrane,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2001 “Private Property,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

1994 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL GROUP EXHIBITIONS 1991 BFA, California State University, Fullerton, CA

2022 “Alex Dodge & Tom LaDuke: We Contain Multitudes,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2021 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2020 “It’s All About Water” (curated by Elizabeth Fiore & Melissa Feldman), The Storefront, Bellport, NY

2018 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2018 “Belief in Giants,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2016 “New Work,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY

2011 “Loose Canon,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

2015 “Candles and Lasers,” Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2010 “Inaugural Exhibition,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY “New Art for a New Century: Contemporary Acquisitions 2000–2010,” Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA “FYI–The Reflected Gaze: Self Portraiture Today,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA

2011 “eyes for voice,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY 2010 “run generator,” Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA and Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC “Auto-Destruct,” Angles Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2007 “when no one is watching,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2009 “Tools,” Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA 2008 “Like Lifelike: Painting in the Third Dimension,” Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA

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“New Works: A Group Show of Gallery Artists,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “SceneSeen: Recent Acquisitions from the Luckman Fine Arts Complex Permanent Collection, 1979–2006,” California State University, Los Angeles, CA 2007 “LA Bodies: Figuration in Sculpture,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Suburban Sublime,” Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, San Diego, CA “Rogue Wave,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA 2005 “The Blake Byrne Collection,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA “New Works on Paper,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Terra Non Firma,” Howard House, Seattle, WA

TEACHING

SELECT COLLECTIONS

2010 ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

2005 Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA

Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Winter Park, FL Colección Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico

AWARDS

Luckman Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles, CA

2011 Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant

Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

1992 Trustee Merit Scholarship, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS

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2003 “Sprawl: New Suburban Landscapes,” Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA

Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA

2002 “2002 California Biennial,” Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA “New in Town,” Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR 2001 “furor scribendi: Works on Paper,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY

2000 “Inventional,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition

ALEX DODGE & TOM LADUKE WE CONTAIN MULTITUDES 28 April – 4 June 2022 Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2022 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2022 Evan Moffitt

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Director of Publications Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, Los Angeles, CA Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Kotaro Tsujimoto, Tokyo, Japan Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue designed by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-73-1 Cover: Alex Dodge, Feelings the Elephant, (detail), 2022 and Tom LaDuke, the pit in the hole, (detail), 2022

ALEX DODGE TOM LADUKE

ALEX DODGE TOM LADUKE MILES McENERY GALLERY