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In the context of the group exhibition A Model, Jason Dodge (b. 1969, Newtown, Pennsylvania) has been invited to conceive an epilogue. Tomorrow, I walked to a dark black star materialises as a solo show within a group exhibition.
An epilogue is understood as a speech or piece of text added at the end of a play or book, often making a brief statement about what happens to the characters after the play or book is finished. The exhibition, as epilogue, becomes at once medium–object–subject, working together to tap into how we perceive things, and subsequently transform them. This reverse way of mounting an exhibition of an artist’s work in an existing exhibition, consisting in the addition of a layer to something already existing, gives way to an exploration of the potentials of both a group show and a solo show, disturbing and expanding their respective frames and temporalities.
Jason Dodge is interested in the landscape that we see and the landscape of our lives, what we have and what we think, who we connect to and who we distance ourselves from – the things that comprise this work come directly from the landscape we have made together. Think of a pocket emptied out on any day, the traces of a part of us can be seen in bits of paper, some coins, a ticket for something, some dust, proof you were here, proof you were living.
The things and traces that comprise Dodge’s work remind us that bodies and minds are not displaced from each other. Just as our bodies are part of other systems and organisms and connected to other bodies. Dodge enacts a shared experience in which cause and effect, touching and letting go, are a circular event. These familiar, at times marginal, remains become strange to us through the artist’s gestures. This exhibition Tomorrow, I walked to a dark black star takes on the language contained in existing things and how we transform them over and over.
For the artist, things exist, always in the present tense. While we can trace our relationship to something we can recognise, we can never know its complete story. The title Tomorrow, I walked to a dark black star, a line from a poem by Alfred Starr Hamilton (b. 1914 – 2015, Montclair, New Jersey), is also a found element in the epilogue. The gap in syntax between the future and the past tense highlights the artist’s ability to trouble fixed entities. What are the boundaries between what the artist has done and what we have done?
Biography
Jason Dodge (b. 1969, Newtown, Pennsylvania) has presented exhibitions in galleries, museums, biennials, art centres, and artist-run spaces since the late 1990s. His work is held in several public collections. In 2012 Dodge founded and continues to edit the poetry imprint Fivehundred places. Dodge recently presented the solo exhibitions Cut a Door in the Wolf, MACRO, Rome (2021) and They lifted me into the sun and packed my empty skull in cinnamon, a six-part exhibition held at Akwa Ibom, Athens; Guimaraes, Vienna; MOREpublishers with Gevaert Editions, Brussels; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin and Gern en Regalia, New York (2020); at the height of the pandemic each exhibition was installed by several artists including Eva Barto, SoiL Thornton and Giorgio Griffa. Other solo exhibitions include: Jason Dodge with Ishion Hutchinson: The Broad Church of Night, the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, curated by Dieter Roelstraete, Chicago (2018); Water Paper Cut, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2017); Behind this machine anyone with a mind who cares can enter, IAC – Institut d’Art Contemporain de Villeurbanne (2016). Dodge co-curated Enemy of the Stars with Krist Gruijthuijsen at KW Institute, Berlin (2017). His work has recently been included in The Collection for the 21st Century at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin (2023) and in group exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (2020); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); MIT List Visual Arts Centre, Cambridge, USA (2017). He lives on Møn.