Tomory Dodge's paintings have a deep sense of pictorial space. Dodge begins his works with patterns of stripes and shapes. Over this initial visual structure, he lays in a network of expressive brushwork, dots and lines. The result is a pictorially engaged surface of striking color combinations and active mark-making.
In the course of making his work, Dodge scrapes down his canvases frequently, building them up again and again over months of studio practice. Tomory Dodge’s works change a great deal during their creation, perhaps in part because for him, any perceived endpoint is a pathway to a new beginning. Tomory Dodge searches in his works to push our sense of a given painting's image as well as our sense of its space, commenting that, “I have often talked about paintings being inherently contradictory things. A painting is an object, but it is also a sort of window. It is a physical object that becomes space. There is a whole universe in that."
Many of Tomory Dodge’s recent works use optical mixing as a visual strategy. “They vibrate and shimmer if given the chance,” he notes. These paintings play on the possibilities that pop up when one's individual sensations are broken down into a complex surface of applied physical signs, i.e., brushstrokes. "I have long been fascinated by the alchemy of modern image creation, having realized as a child that the pictures on my family’s old analog TV set were composed of little dots. Since then, I have been interested in the image in painting on both the 'molecular' and 'macro' levels - how one can show and see both the forest AND the trees at the same time.” In his work, Tomory Dodge enlists himself and us in the sensorial and intellectual task of navigating paintings and their possibilities.
Tomory DODGE (b. 1974, Denver, CO) received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI) and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA) in 2004. Tomory Dodge's work was recently the subject of the solo exhibition, "Hair Into Gold and Back Again," and the group exhibition, "Pocket Universe," at Philip Martin Gallery. Recent solo exhibitions include Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Miles McEnery Gallery (New York, NY); LUX Art Institute (Encinitas, CA); "Stranger Than Paradise," Rhode Island School of Design Museum (Providence, RI); "Grafforists," Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA); "Nowism," Pizzuti Collection (Columbus, OH); "An Appetite For Painting," National Museum (Oslo, Norway); "Pouring It On," Herter Art Gallery, University of Massachusetts (Amherst, MA); "Tomory Dodge and Denise Thomasos: Directions to a Dirty Place," Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (Winston-Salem, NC); "Future Tense: Reshaping the Landscape," Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, NY); "American Soil," Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS); "Sheldon Survey," Sheldon Memorial Gallery, University of Nebraska (Lincoln, NE). His work is in the collections of such museums as Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA); Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach, CA); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, (San Francisco, CA); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA); Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA); Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX); Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS); Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis, MN); Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis, MN); Orlando Museum of Art (Orlando, FL); Knoxville Museum of Art (Knoxville, TN); Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (Birmingham, AL); Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC); Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC); RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI); Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT); and Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY). Dodge's work is the subject of several monographic catalogs and has been discussed in such publications as Artforum, Flash Art, Modern Painters, Art Review, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. Dodge lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.