ART CITIES: Luxemburd-Jason Dodge

Jason Dodge’s work is born out of love for a simple economy of visual and literal language. The seemingly minimal sculptures and spatial interventions expose the artist’s intense interest in the emotional potential for objects to transmit meaning. Unexpected combinations of apparently familiar objects, presented out of place and stripped of their function or purpose, create an elusive and poetic narrative sustained by a broad network of associations.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Mudam Archive

In the context of the group exhibition “A Model”, Jason Dodge has been invited to conceive an epilogue, “Tomorrow, I walked to a dark black star” materializes 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. The 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?

Photo: Exhibition view: Jason Dodge, Tomorrow, I walked to a dark black star, 2024, Mudam Luxembourg, © Photo: Aurélien Mole | Mudam Luxembourg

Info: Curators: Bettina Steinbrügge with Sarah Beaumont, Clément Minighetti and Joel Valabrega, Mudam – The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg, 3 Park Dräi Eechelen, Luxembourg, Duration: 4/5-8/9/2024, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 10:00-18;00, Wed 10:00-21:00, www.mudam.com/