Tomory Dodge by Miles McEnery Gallery

TOMORY DODGE

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

511 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

CAUSE!PLUS!EFFECT!MULTIPLIED"! TOMORY!DODGE’S!RECENT!PAINTINGS By Terry R. Myers

During this past year—an unusual one, it goes without saying—I’ve started thinking about art, and especially painting, as a phenomenon that has been taking place, all along, within its own kind of “multiverse.” Not one overrun with superheroes (at least for now?), but instead its own version of a situation in which a!ributes and abilities once thought to be fundamentally separate (taking place in diﬀerent places and/or times, for example) are brought together, over and over, almost as if there is a literal magnetic a!raction that also embodies repulsion (in the scientific sense of that loaded word). 3

This has helped me with my thinking about the exponential and ongoing increase of representational figure painting that seems to be filling every nook and cranny: At first, I was convinced that it reflected nothing more than another period of Mannerism, focused as it should be on a!enuation, reworking, and re-presentation. That such a moment would take place a#er postmodernism also made sense in terms of what could be perceived as its triumph of expansive relativity over the narrowing specificity of modernist/formalist progress that had carried on for nearly a century. This, of course, also had serious consequences for so-called abstract painting, as entire generations of postmodern and post-postmodern artists have already worked their way well past the notion that there still was (or ever had been) a choice that had to be made about this or, for that ma!er, pre!y much anything else. This brings me to Tomory Dodge’s recent paintings. During my studio visit, the first I had done in over a year, and the first I’d ever done wearing a mask (something I’m mentioning because I’ll come back to it), my mind went right to a notion that I’ve had for a while, one that comes from mathematics of all things. Imagine if you could solve a mathematical equation either by doing it in the order you’re supposed to, or

by adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing everything simultaneously or in any arrangement whatsoever. In mathematics, you’d get very diﬀerent answers, and only one would be right; in painting no result would be right or wrong, and any result could be a solution.1

painting as dancing and raising its arms. I think it is OK to see this.) In the case of paintings like Mother of Bad Ideas and Oddest Mound, the titles trigger the interpretation of bodies having expanded to a point of no return, piled up with just a li!le too much stuﬀ. (And that’s wonderfully in Philip Guston’s grinding wheelhouse.)

Standing in front of Dodge’s paintings, unfinished yet well on their way, it was clear to me that he had moved his work squarely into the painting multiverse that I’ve suggested above. A#er a couple of decades’ worth of solid paintings that arranged and rearranged the terms of their “equations,” these newest paintings strongly suggest a sophisticated coming to terms with their potential for multiplicity and freedom, while remaining commi!ed to some of the most tried-and-true, even intrinsic, components of painting, which remains a unique enterprise.

I’ve borrowed “insists” from an essay that has been a big influence on me ever since I first read it in the late 1980s: “Writing on a Text of the Life” by J.R.R. Christie and Fred Orton.2 Fundamentally an analysis of the role biography plays in our experience of art, this essay sets up a modern/postmodern opposition that I now think may be yet another false choice. Cu!ing to the chase, I think Dodge’s paintings do the same.

Take, for example, a painting called Wild Fox Body. As with all of Dodge’s paintings, there is a tremendous amount of stuff that comes together as a kind of roughly rectangular body existing in and on a rectangular surface. This could be understood as the overarching requirement for these recent paintings, a tautological anchoring of the work that literally grounds the remainder of the work’s numerous visual and physical a!ributes and their possible functions within the overall space of the painting as a painting and as a picture. This is key, as is the close a!ention that is being paid to surface here. While it is self-evident that Dodge produces a wide range of surface effects with the paint he uses (all the while reinforcing that the paint itself can also be given many different surfaces as paint), the painting “insists” on its own overall surface. So, then, in the case of another painting like Horns, the body in and on the body of the painting may be more diffuse that the one in Wild Fox Body, almost slipping in and out of focus despite the all-over distribution of Dodge’s signature multi-colored zig-zag pa!ern, which makes me think of the likes of Picasso’s figures of musicians, even though they’re not really the same at all. (I can’t help but see the figure in Dodge’s

1. See my essay “Change of Seen,” in Varda Caivano: The Density of the Actions (Chicago: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 2015), pp. 73–78.

Christie and Orton start with another writer’s theory—Richard Wollheim’s influential essay “The Work of Art as Object” from 1970—that they summarize in three points. For Christie and Orton, Wollheim’s theory first insists upon the surface of the painting and its possession by the artist; then it claims that the painter must work with the medium in a characteristic way, so that the viewer knows that the surface he or she is looking at is the surface of a painting; and, finally, the surface itself must be “used” in a way that may partially or wholly obscure the fact that it is the surface of a painting. Christie and Orton hit a roadblock with Wollheim’s theory when the la!er claimed that Mark Rothko’s use of the surface of the painting is to “produce and preserve a formal counterpart for the ‘expressive quality’ of the painting,” expression itself having become one of the (if not the) biggest bugaboos in postmodern discourse.3 They go on to use their critique of Wollheim to construct one of their own major claims: that there is no such thing as expression in art, only claims to it. This is a big problem. Or, actually, I think it was a big problem. Ge!ing back on track, I think Dodge’s paintings have done more than their fair share of shi#ing these

2. J.R.R. Christie and Fred Orton, “Writing on a Text of the Life,” Art History 11, no. 4 (December 1988), pp. 544–64. 3. Ibid., p. 546.

seemingly binary options into the mix of his own painterly and pictorial multiverse. At this point, it is important to recognize, in particular, the paintings that he produced between 2007 and 2011.4 With the advantage of hindsight, it is now possible to see just how much he was investigating the approach of Gerhard Richter in order to avoid Richter’s necessarily bifurcated territory and push himself to make paintings that literally expand and intermingle their horizons. (This is precisely why Dodge’s move into Pierre Bonnard’s color territory makes sense, as I find it impossible to let Bonnard be circumscribed by labeling him as either an Impressionist or a Postimpressionist.)

Dodge’s titles also do their part for his multiverse. For example, he chose Wild Fox Body mainly because it refers to a Zen koan that suggests that people see their true nature when they recognize the oneness of cause and eﬀect. I don’t think it is an overstatement to say that the oneness of the bodies in and of Dodge’s paintings contain multitudes. In the case of one last painting called The Krell, the reference is to an extinct advanced race from the planet Altair IV in the 1956 film Forbidden Planet. Living subterraneanly (in the “body” of their planet?), they were believed by the human researcher who arrived a#er their disappearance to be able (among other things) to reproduce anything down to the molecular level if they were in possession of a prior sample. They also were the creators of a “plastic educator” device that could create a three-dimensional visualization of the operator’s thoughts. (Alas, that one ended up being deadly for humans.) There was, tellingly enough, no evidence of what the Krell looked like. This is where I think again about that mask I wore in the studio and how we all have had to adjust our own “claims” to expression. I can’t help but think that all of this has everything to do with the achievements of Dodge’s recent paintings, even if we’re not really able to comprehend the multiverse just yet. Terry R. Myers is a writer and independent curator based in Los Angeles and an editor-at-large of the Brooklyn Rail. He is the author of Mary Heilmann: Save the Last Dance for Me (2007) and the editor of Painting: Documents of Contemporary Art (2011). His most recent curatorial project was the survey exhibition Candida Alvarez: Here at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2017. He was Chair of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 2013 - 2018.

4. See Tomory Dodge: Paintings 2007–2011 (Los Angeles, New York and London: ACME, CRG Gallery, Alison Jacques Gallery, 2015).

Couple, 2020 Oil on canvas 72 x 60 inches 182.9 x 152.4 cm

Giant, 2020 Oil on canvas 84 x 60 inches 213.4 x 152.4 cm

Ashes and Onwards, 2021 Oil on canvas 72 x 60 inches 182.9 x 152.4 cm

Horns, 2021 Oil on canvas 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

Lover, 2021

Oil on canvas 30 x 25 inches 76.2 x 63.5 cm

Lush Thicket, 2021 Oil on canvas 60 x 60 inches 152.4 x 152.4 cm

March to April, 2021

Oil on canvas 48 x 48 inches 121.9 x 152.4 cm

Mother of Bad Ideas, 2021 Oil on canvas 72 x 72 inches 182.9 x 182.9 cm

Oddest Mound, 2021

Oil on canvas 84 x 80 inches 213.4 x 203.2 cm

The Krell, 2021 Oil on canvas 86 x 60 inches 218.4 x 152.4 cm

In Fire Light, 2021

Oil on canvas 72 x 60 inches 182.9 x 152.4 cm

Pink Morning, 2021

Oil on canvas 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

Wild Fox Body, 2021 Oil on canvas 72 x 60 inches 182.9 x 152.4 cm

Pet, 2021 Oil on canvas 16 x 14 inches 40.6 x 35.6 cm

Sleeping Ruin, 2021 Oil on canvas 16 x 14 inches 40.6 x 35.6 cm

Field of Flowers, 2021

Oil on canvas 22 x 18 inches 55.9 x 45.7 cm

Golden Hour, 2021

Oil on canvas 17 x 15 inches 43.2 x 38.1 cm

TOMORY DODGE Born in Denver, CO in 1974 Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

2013 ACME., Los Angeles, CA 2012 ACME., Los Angeles, CA Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Zuoz, Switzerland

EDUCATION 2004 MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA 1998 BFA, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI 1997 European Honors Program, Rhode Island School of Design, Rome, Italy

2011 CRG Gallery, New York, NY 2010 Alison Jacques Gallery, London, United Kingdom 2009 “Works on Paper,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY “A#er Forever,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA 2008 CRG Gallery, New York, NY

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2021 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2007 Alison Jacques Gallery, London, United Kingdom ACME., Los Angeles, CA

2019 Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2006 Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN CRG Gallery, New York, NY

2018 Lux Art Institute, Encinitas, CA Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles, CA

2004 ACME., Los Angeles, CA Taxter & Spengemann, New York, NY MFA Thesis Exhibition, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA

2017 “Deep Sleep,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY Inman Gallery, Houston, TX 2015 “The Outside Therein,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA 2014 CRG Gallery, New York, NY Alison Jacques Gallery, London, United Kingdom

2003 A402 Gallery, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA 1999 CORE New Art Space, Denver, CO 1998 Pirate Contemporary Arts Oasis, Denver, CO

GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2020 “The Spaces In Between,” Ceysson & Bénétière, New York, NY “Brathwaite, Cheng, Coulis, Cowan, Dodge, Dove, Glabush, Huckaby, Jorden, Luck, O’Neill, Petit-Frère,” Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Do You Think It Needs a Cloud,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY “The Vista,” Durden and Ray, Los Angeles, CA 2019 “Yin/Yang,” O-O LA, Los Angeles, CA 2018 “Belief in Giants,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY “Night Walk,” Inman Gallery, Houston, TX 2017 “Color & Pa!ern,” Pivot Art + Culture, Sea!le, WA “Stranger Than Paradise,” Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI 2016 “Tom Friedman (+The Birthday Show),” 1969 Gallery, New York, NY “Passage,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA “I’ll Not Be In Your Damn Ledger,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY “Graﬀorists,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA “Cult of Color,” Circuit 12, Dallas, TX 2015 “Lost in a Sea of Red,” The Pit, Glendale, CA “One Foot on the Ground,” James Harris Gallery, Sea!le, WA “Mona,” 68 Projects, Berlin, Germany “Remains,” Durden and Ray, Los Angeles, CA 2014 “An Appetite for Painting,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark “NOW-ISM: Abstraction Today,” Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH

“An Appetite for Painting, National Museum of Contemporary Art,” Oslo, Norway “Painters’ Painters,” Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom “INCOGNITO 10,” Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA “20 Years of ACME.,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA 2013 “Odd Harmonics,” Judith Charles Gallery, New York, NY “Tomory Dodge & Denyse Thomasos: Directions to a Dirty Place,” Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC 2012 “Pulp2,” Beta Pictoris Gallery, Maus Contemporary, Birmingham, AL “To Live and Paint in LA,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA “Chasm of the Supernova,” Center for the Arts Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, CA 2011 “VISIONS: Ali Banisadr, Jules de Balincourt, Tomory Dodge, Barnaby Furnas and Ryan Mosley,” Monica De Cardenas Galleria, Milan, Italy “Works of Paper,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA “Creating the New Century: Contemporary Art from the Dicke Collection,” Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH “Art / Music / Alchemy,” Starkwhite, Auckland, New Zealand 2010 “Inaugural Show,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY “Palm Paintings,” Buchmann Galerie, Berlin, Germany “The Language of Flowers,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY “Library of Babel/In and Out of Place,” Zabludowicz Collection, London, United Kingdom 2009 “The Summer Show,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY “Slow Magic,” The Bluecoat, Liverpool, United Kingdom “Opportunities,” BravinLee Programs, New York, NY “Surveillance,” Aﬃrmation Arts, New York, NY

2008 “Art on Paper,” Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC “New Prints 2008/Spring,” International Print Center, New York, NY “New Prints 2008/Spring,” New York School of Interior Design Gallery, New York, NY “Future Tense: Reshaping the Landscape,” Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY “The Prom – A Survey of Contemporary Painting Strategies,” Lawrimore Project, Sea!le, WA “Some Paintings: The Third LA Weekly Annual Biennial,” Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2007 “American Soil,” Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS “Sheldon Survey,” Sheldon Memorial Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE “Fata Morgana,” Galerie Schmidt Maczollek, Cologne, Germany “Tug Boat,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA “Endangered Wasteland,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY

2003 “Lordship and Bondage,” LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University, New York, NY “Art Weird,” Stevenson Blanche Gallery, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA

SELECT COLLECTIONS

2002 “Paper Weight,” Stevenson Blanche Gallery, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA

Henry Art Gallery, Sea!le, WA

2000 “The Book As Art,” Boulder Public Exhibition Space, Boulder, CO

Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA Collezione Maramo!i, Reggio Emilia, Italy

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA

1998 “Mostra Finale,” Palazzeto di Cenci, Rome, Italy

Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS

AWARDS

Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA

2004 Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, New York, NY

Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH

2006 The Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant Recipients, CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY “New Prints 2006/Summer: COLOR,” International Print Center, New York, NY

Rachofsky House, Dallas, TX RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA

2005 “Fast Forward: Passion for the New,” House of Campari, Venice, CA “Rogue Wave 2005,” LA Louver, Venice, CA “Evidence,” Inman Gallery, Houston, TX “New View,” Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS 2004 “Super Sonic,” ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA “Singing My Song,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA “Surface Tension,” Lombard Freid Fine Arts, New York, NY “Field Trip,” San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT Zabludowicz Art Collection, London, United Kingdom

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

TOMORY!DODGE 9 September – 16 October 2021 Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2021 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2021 Terry R. Myers Director of Publications Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY Photography by Robert Wedemeyer, Los Angeles, CA Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue designed by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-50-2 Cover: Wild Fox Body, (detail), 2021