Tomory Dodge
Tomory Dodge's paintings describe places on the edge of society, clandestine sites where revelers might go to partake in the illicit or where youth might go to explore and possibly uncover the remains of a hiker that lost his way. While much of the imagery in his work is in fact drawn from things observed during excursions into the California desert much is left to fantasy. While the subject matter is rich throughout his work, the material itself is often even more so. Dodge s surfaces are held together by networks of well understood gestures; thickly laid on with crude precision, each with a sense of economy and intention independent of the images they constitute. And thus the images represented begin to seem more like clever armatures for something more concerned with the abstract and gestural. While much of his paintings appear to be influenced by a cinematic understanding of image and light with such characteristics as lens-flare and anamorphic distortion, anomalies found only in the realm of photography, it is for Dodge a means of expanding an already vast vocabulary of imagery in the service of paint. Tomory Dodge was born in 1974 in Denver, Colorado. He now lives and works in Los Angeles.