Evocations of particle physics and science fiction, data visualization and set theory, references to manga, street art, expressionism, cubo-futurism, and deco-pop... Adam's ever-resolving graphical vocabulary, his facility with tension in line and composition, his chaoid abstractions have been fracturing my attention since I first started tracking him through a zine of drawings circa 2002. A year later I stumbled across his manic schizoanalytic paintings in his ECI studio... I fed him a cigar, then barraged him for an hour or two with my politicized interpretation of his developing milieu. Adam indulged my hyperbolic speculations graciously...
It seemed to me then that Dodd, running in parallel with Robert Mearns, on a slightly different track than Eli Bornowsky and Nicholas Pittman's at-the-time-more-formalistic pursuits - all together signified to me a wave of enthusiasm cresting in the local visual-lexical landscape, shifting the aesthetic emphasis away from predominant styles of the time: neither everyday-sardonic/ironic anthropological conceptualism, nor the delightfully bathetic doodle-art mid-brow taking stage for its moment of sun just then. These painters, with Matthew Brown, Elizabeth McKintosh, Etienne Zack, Krisdy Shindler and significant others, were leading painterly sensibilities back towards a reinivigorated exploration of existing traditions in abstraction, and I saw beautiful patterns emerging...
Reducing repro-graphics to their most deconstructed elements - integrating the too-low-for-fine-art syntax of popular illustration and commercial design, Dodd worked extensively at articulating an aesthetic tendency I found highly relevant and patently verboten during my seasons in artschool... As waves of subtle influence gradually reached the outer colonies, Julie Mehretu, Matthew Ritchie, Frank Nitsche, were all over the magazine covers and major galleries - not just for Juxtapoz anymore, the Superflat had earned its cache. Likewise, Phaidon's Vitamin D and P, the VAG's popularist Drawing the World [2003] and Krazy! [2008] exhibitions have bolstered the pleasant intuition that further pure abstract graphical research remains a viable and valued pursuit worthy of celebration and preservation...
Adam's paintings are uncontestibly beautiful, but to my eyes, the athleticism of his early formal studies showed best in his drawings. The paintings apply Dodd's graphical vocabulary to satisfying structural ends: bright colours balancing attractively composed forms offsetting color fields in bold palettes. All are thrilling and evocative, and will handsomely grace walls and corridors of the burgeoning construction projects that inspired the series.
In his drawings, a more paranoid cubistic uncertainty takes place, abruptly phase-shifting between impressions of conceptual architecture, mathematical field-vectors, northwest coast formline motifs, geological surveys, manga action-graphics... an uncanny physics is at work, unspeakable stories are telling themselves - Dodd leans in on simple tools and leaves behind a dazzling trail of impossible maps sure to enrapture our most graphophilic viewers. His tense lines are emblematic of the multivalent, shape-shifting social problematics we each deeply occupy simply in order to operate in this city of glass [...ceilings...]
Having eliminated all final traces of googly-eyed pop and grafitti flash, Adam's 'New Works' push ever further out, suggesting new fields for an evocative counter-representation, demarcating fresh nodes on that emergent edge, making a provocative contribution to outward vectors in contemporary abstraction's graphical episteme.
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New Works by Adam Dodd at the Grace Gallery, June 2008, review by Steve Calvert for Bachelor Machines.
ART by Adam Dodd
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