Biography
Harry Dodge is an American sculptor, performer, video artist, and writer, whose interdisciplinary practice is characterized by its explorations of relation, materiality, the unnamable with a special focus on ecstatic contamination. His solo and collaborative work has been exhibited at many venues nationally and internationally, including (currently), Selections from the Permanent Collection at MOCA (LA); the 2008 Whitney Biennial; a solo show titled, Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2013; and Hammer Museum’s 2014 Biennial, Made in L.A. Dodge’s work is in collections including Museum of Modern Art (NY), Museum of Contemporary Art (LA), Hammer Museum (LA). His most recent solo exhibition was The Inner Reality of Ultra-Intelligent Life, at Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts, organized by Suzy Halajian, which followed 2015’s solo exhibition, The Cybernetic Fold at Wallspace, NY. Recent group exhibitions include: The Promise of Total Automation at Kunsthalle Wien Austria; a three-person show at London’s The Approach Gallery, Triples: Harry Dodge, Evan Holloway and Peter Shelton; Routine Pleasures a show organized by Michael Ned Holte at the MAK Center in Los Angeles; and a group show, Protuberances curated by Jess Arndt and Catherine Taft at LAX Art.
In 2016, a section from a Dodge’s short story titled High Five for Ram Dass was included in pamphlet/zine, Night Papers 8, curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer and Kate Wolf. An interview that Dodge conducted with artist MPA, Mourning the Earth, was recently posted at BOMB Magazine, and an interview with Dodge (by Carrie Kellerby) is here: http://bombmagazine.org/article/0917518/mpa
In the early 90s, Dodge was one of the founders of the now-legendary San Francisco community-based performance space, The Bearded Lady, which served as a touchstone for a pioneering, queer, DIY literary and arts scene. During that time Dodge also wrote, directed, and performed several critically-acclaimed, evening-length, monologue-based performances, including Muddy Little River (1996) and From Where I’m Sitting (I Can Only Reach Your Ass) (1997). In the latter part of 90s, Dodge co-wrote, directed, edited and starred in (with Silas Howard) a narrative feature film, By Hook or By Crook, which premiered at Sundance in 2002 and went on to garner five Best Feature awards. From 2004 to 2008, Dodge was half of a renowned video-making collaboration with artist Stanya Kahn.
Dodge is currently working on a book-length essay titled My Meteorite.
Dodge holds an MFA from Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College and is permanent faculty of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts, Program in Art.
Program
Big Bang (Song of the Cosmic Hobo) (2016, video, color, sound, 11 mins.)
In Big Bang (Song of the Cosmic Hobo), Harry Dodge appears as a low-rent automaton in an urgent quest to launch a small group of cosmic particles back into a state of pure potentiality. In this film, a cyborg (a shirtless Dodge with a Chroma key green cardboard-box robot head) purchases a particleboard cabinet at IKEA and, after gloriously smashing it to bits with a sledgehammer, heads out to scatter the dust at a Grand Canyon scenic overlook. In swift order, the work invokes questions about consumerism, materiality, and the possible fecundity of dissolution or destruction.
Mysterious Fires (2016, video, color, sound, 24 mins.)
In Mysterious Fires, Harry Dodge plays a human-level machine intelligence being interviewed by a concerned interlocutor (played by Cay Castagnetto); the video reflects Dodge’s interest in the fast-moving, ethically-charged field of robotics and machine intelligence. The conceptual, pedagogical discussion the two characters engage in is faceted throughout by their amusing interpersonal dynamic and idiosyncratic means of verbal delivery, which extends to include other members of the filming crew, breaking the proverbial “fourth wall.” In short, while performing a script primarily concerned with the terrifying pall of absolute instrumentality (the future of machine intelligence), the characters and crew frequently interrupt themselves with wit, affection, delight, error, flattery, and absurdity. Through disruption and play, Mysterious Fires asks its audience to consider where fallibility, care, love, and laughter (affect) belong in a situation of absolute, super-charged intelligence—especially if intelligence is defined as the virtuosic mastery of goal-achievement.
Fred Can Never be Called Bald (2011, video, color, sound, 39:45 mins.)
Fred Can Never Be Called Bald is a sustained, essayistic meditation on the transformation of matter: into new states or new meanings, and, via digitization, into the virtual world. The title derives from a famous logical fallacy (called a continuum fallacy) in which bivalent thinking (i.e. “bald” or “not bald”) forecloses the apprehension of a change. In other words, in a continuum fallacy, a change is said to be impossible simply because its exact moment of arrival cannot be discerned. Via a distorted collage of YouTube clips, many of which depict explosions and other extreme physical incidents, the video attempts to slow down or otherwise make manifest transformation—to attempt, even if in vain, a better apprehension of the transitive. Its use of YouTube is driven by Dodge’s fascination with those YouTube participants who appear both enthralled with the digital or virtual world, and also enchanted by—even desperately engaged with—their own physical bodies and forces of nature. Made while Dodge’s mother was dying from cancer (and completed a week after her death), Fred Can Never Be Called Bald also reflects Dodge’s own awed, stricken response to the material transformation brought about by death, and concludes with Dodge’s own personal contribution to the collage of video clips here gathered.