ROME.- Cut a Door in the Wolf is an exhibition in the form of a single site-specific artwork by artist Jason Dodge (1969). Exploring systems made up of organic and inorganic matter, Dodge is interested in the stuff that human beings shed— day in, day out. Micro- and macro-landscapes made up of the familiar and often discarded things that result from our individual and collective habits are laid out in the space. Their appearance seems to suggest that everything is indeed in everything. Through gestural action, an avoidance of a direct subject, and insistence on the viewers’ own subjective agency, Dodge investigates the potential of the viewer as producer of meaning.
The traces collected by Dodge remind us that our minds and bodies are not separate entities, just as our bodies are not disconnected from other bodies, organisms, systems or things. These familiar, at times marginal, remains become strange to us through the artist’s gestures. He in turn recognizes this not as a singular artistic process, but rather as a shared landscape in which cause and effect are circular phenomena that belong to everyone.
For Dodge, thoughts are things and so are words, just as things are also both words and thoughts. Working with poetry and bodily movement as material, the artist offers a haptic landscape of displaced matter to the viewers, to other practitioners, and to those who work with him to realize the exhibition. Thus the exhibition itself becomes at once medium, object and subject, all of which work together to tap into how we both perceive existing things and subsequently transform them, again and again.
Conceived as a body in flux, this exhibition includes the presence of poet CAConrad and of dancer/choreographer Alix Eynaudi. Each bring their own work within this context to freely create different layers and assemblages of perception. In addition the space will welcome the introduction of additional artefacts during its course, which may be the work of other artists, design pieces, images or unsigned objects.
Exhibition title by CAConrad.
Jason Dodge (1969) lives on Møn, Denmark. Dodge has been making exhibitions in galleries, museums, biennials, art centers, and artist run spaces since the late 1990's. His work is held in several public collections. In 2012 Dodge founded and continues to edit the poetry imprint Fivehundred places. Recent solo exhibitions include, 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, Franco Noero's Fetta di Polenta space, and Gern en Regalia, NYC; at the height of the pandemic each exhibition was installed by different artists including Eva Barto, SoiL Thornton, and Giorgio Griffa. Other exhibitions include: poet Ishion Hutchinson and Jason Dodge The Broad Church of Night at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society curated by Deiter Roelstraete, Chicago (2018) Water Paper Cut at The Schinkel Pavillon Berlin (2017), IAC – Institut d’Art Contemporain de Villeurbanne (2016). Dodge cocurated Enemy of the Stars with Krist Gruijthuijsen at KW Institute, Berlin (2017) and has recently had works shown at Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (2020), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018), MIT List Visual Arts Centre, Cambridge, USA (2017)
