TOMORY DODGE

"Growing up in Denver in the 1980s, Dodge had a habit of drawing in front of the television set, often sitting close to the screen. The family had an old-school TV with reception provided by rabbit ears, rather than a rooftop antenna or a cable connection. This resulted in all the low-fi static and pixelation that were signatures of the cathode ray tube experience. The tendency of Dodge’s zigzags to fall apart and reconstitute, along with the glitch passages and paint blobs, all hearken back to the fuzzy images of his pre-digital youth, summoning memories of 'falling in love with drawing in the presence of a screen,' as he put it to me. That was a more innocent time, when signal-to-noise ratios were obvious, even on a crappy set. Now we live in an era of high resolution and AI deep fakes—you can believe nothing you see, no matter how authentic it looks."

- Daniel Gerwin in "Freeform: Tomory Dodge’s Square Waves and Glitches"

"Dodge includes what he calls 'glitches' in the visual field: messy patches reserved from the canvas’s first layer that have generally been scraped to a blurry haze. The glitches interrupt the image’s dominant patterns and disrupt its prevailing logic (as in the 2024 painting Breakfast In Bed). The vibrating hues of the zigzag patterns are so powerful that if you look for even a minute the glitches seem to float free, hovering about a foot in front of the canvas. Yet Dodge is committed to keeping his paintings on the surface: He periodically tosses little globs of paint onto the canvas, where they lie like spat-out chewing gum on a sidewalk, reinforcing the picture plane, lest you be taken in by the artist’s considerable illusionistic powers."

- Daniel Gerwin in "Freeform: Tomory Dodge’s Square Waves and Glitches"

"Dodge typically begins a pattern on one or two edges simultaneously and works his way in. Because he wields his brush freehand rather than following pre-drawn lines or tape, the motif gets wonky as he fills the canvas. The resulting 'errors' are resolved spontaneously—adding diamonds, rectangles, or more irregular shapes to allow the unaligned zigzags to synch up (as in the 2024 painting Telephone Tells Me). Dodge plays with this device by shifting his starting points to great effect. In Mental Physics (2024), he starts the pattern in three locations: on the left side, on the right side, and from the middle, so that the irregularities occur in two columns, each a third of the way across the painting's horizontal axis. Like many good painters, Dodge takes his canvases right up to the edge of the cliff by breaking down the zigzags and further interrupting the imagery with seemingly random glitches. A lesser artist would fall into the chaotic crevasse between Riley and free jazz, but Dodge pulls it off."

- Daniel Gerwin in "Freeform: Tomory Dodge’s Square Waves and Glitches"

"The syncopation of the three fundamental pictorial features is musical. Dodge has been hacking around on drums, guitar, and synthesizer since he was a teenager, and he clearly has a strong sense of rhythm. Each of these new works possesses a distinctive synesthetic arrangement of beats, derived from the square waves' percussive dance across the surface (they actually resemble sound waves) and set off by the zigzags' manic rush along the opposite axis. Both cadences are accented by the popping treble notes of the glitches. If the paintings were songs, they might be club music. In fact, the freewheeling way in which Dodge lays down his zigzags reminds me of the short dashes and curving lines Keith Haring used to animate his figures, often making them dance."

- Daniel Gerwin in "Freeform: Tomory Dodge’s Square Waves and Glitches"