Jason Dodge: Gemini

As Dieter Roelstrate wrote about Jason Dodge’s work. “One could be forgiven for calling Jason Dodge a poet. He is a sculptor, handler of things, words, have little to do with what he does. Yet there is no mistaking the syntactic quality of his peculiarly economic way with objects, things. The deliberate scansion that imbues his command of space—his material phraseology, so to speak. One word, right there—and then a comma, there. The writer’s art of pacing and spacing, the poet’s bellyaching over the precise order of three nouns on a page, for instance, resembles the artist’s serene resolution in devising the right rhythm for a given space—and ‘empty’ is just what it looks like, not what it feels like.”

For this exhibition at Gallery Allen, Jason chose to invite Florence Jung to contribute both in conversation and practice, including two of her recent scenarios. One could also be forgiven for describing Florence Jung as a poet. Her contortions of psychological expectations evoke persona poems, in which the poet embodies a character’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences, presenting them in the first person as if speaking directly as that persona.

In Jung’s case, she describes a scenario, but the outcome of the action can only be a projection. By design, we will never be made aware of the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the receiver or the person on “the other end of the telephone.” Unless the scenario is addressed to you individually, you will never experience the scenario taking place.