ALEX DODGE

Personal Day BB&M 1 April–20 May 2023 Seoul

Press Release

BB&M is pleased to present its first solo exhibition of Alex Dodge, whose vibrant, tactile paintings depict uncanny figures and scenes that hover between the digital and the analog, the real and the imaginary. Conceived with advanced digital tools but realized through a manual process indebted to traditional techniques acquired during his extended residence in Japan, Dodge’s work poses questions about the formation of the self and the shifting experience of material culture in our technology-permeated, late-capitalist age.

By turns ambiguous and enigmatic, though vaguely familiar, the forms that populate Dodge’s work straddle overlapping yet indeterminate zones: the anthropomorphic and the artificial, the corporeal and the spectral, the sentient and the inanimate. Key to this effect is Dodge’s deployment of textured patterns in vivid synthetic colors, repeated with variations and distortions, which the artist observes, “could be a stand-in or metaphor for digital systems at large . . . an agnostic, logical system that is overlaid on top of experience.”

The shape of that experience is the subject of Dodge’s work — how we perceive, inhabit, and respond to a world permeated by technologies that increasingly displace collective tropes and narratives with atomized bits and bytes algorithmically served up for an audience of few or even just one. Belonging to the generation of Americans who came of age in a pre-Internet era when the ascendance of mass media coupled with suburban expansion produced a popular culture wedded to the homogenizing dictates of consumerism, the artist is particularly attuned to this displacement — and not without a strangely affecting hint of nostalgia.

Deadpan humor often jostles up against low-grade, existential melancholy. In Intervention (2023), two recurring characters — one vaguely reminiscent of “Snuggles,” the teddy bear from the eponymous fabric-softener ad and the other, of Elmo from the children’s TV show Sesame Street — are shown with cups of coffee at hand (from Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks respectively) in a moment of reckoning with some unspecified psychic crisis. This might be a scene from The Muppets if it were staged by Beckett. Other works in the show — comfortingly familiar, anodyne texts (“ALL YOU CAN EAT,” “SNOW DAY”) rendered as over-stuffed cushions, and gaming gloves embossed with knuckle tattoos — all negotiate this finely calibrated line between critique, memorialization, and recuperation of a particular world once experienced authentically but increasingly accessible only as synthetic representations in the virtual realm.