D-List Recommendation
Dustin Hodges at 15 Orient
Closing tomorrow 4/26-Dustin Hodges at 15 Orient
A friend once told me that Hamlet is, by design, an impossible role to play. Precisely because the role is unplayable, any actor who steps into it is conscripted into a sadistic pageant: revealed as nothing more than an actor, they show the impotence of their craft before an audience. Denuded, they are left with nothing but whatever thin, mannered contrivances they elect to display. Shakespeare created a perfect trap for the vanity of the actor. The play is a meta-play about the impossibility of playing out a character on stage; the failure to be Hamlet is both the intra-dramatic struggle of the character and the extra-dramatic struggle of the actor.
I am often reminded of the Hamlet trap with respect to painting. The medium is moribund; we have seen every contrivance under the sun. The question then is what vanity will be revealed on the canvas. I wonder: what would this painter like me to think about them? Will they hide in hermeticism? Clown in jokey reference? Intone in self-serious didacticism?
Dustin Hodges does a very nice job at not doing any of that at his show at 15 Orient. The paintings are built up in clearly evident layers—washes of color on canvas, visible pencil drawing, heavier forms and figures, and the cartoonish deconstructed birds that sit in strange flatness on the field. The reference is to how cartoons were made in the analog era: with a background scene underneath a cell (a figure on a transparent sheet). The production process allowed animators to produce the layer of animated action without needing to reproduce the static background. Hodges backgrounds have a luscious color sensibility (he is explicit in his debt to Odilon Redon), while his action layer figures resemble the crows from Disney’s Dumbo. The compositions are odd, with the figures breaking down into their abstract components, functioning as volumes in the picture plane more than figures.
The paintings have a real generosity. They are straightforwardly beautiful. But Hodges interest in image-making as something marked by time (personal nostalgia intersecting with technological progress) endows them with a meaning apart from either pure aestheticism or personal sentimentalism.
Check it out.
xox
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