A Model: epilogue

In the context of the group exhibition A Model, Jason Dodge (b. 1969, Newtown, Pennsylvania) has been invited to conceive an epilogue for this show. Tomorrow, I walked to a dark black star will materialise as a solo show within a group exhibition or as an additional layer to an already existing show.

Jason Dodge is interested in the landscape that we see, and the landscape of our lives, what we have, and what we think, who we connect to, and who we distance ourselves from—the things that comprise this work come directly from the landscape we have made together. Think of a pocket emptied out on any day, the traces of a part of us can be seen in bits of paper, some coins, a ticket for something, some dust, proof you were here, proof you were living.

The elements and traces that comprise Dodge’s work remind us that bodies and minds are not displaced from each other. Just as our bodies are part of other systems and organisms and connected to other bodies. Dodge enacts a shared experience in which cause and effect, touching and letting go, are a circular event. These familiar, at times marginal, remains become strange to us through the artist’s gestures. This exhibition Tomorrow, I walked to a dark black star takes on the language contained in existing things, and how we transform them over and over. 

For the artist, things exist, always in the present tense. While we can trace our relationship to something we can recognise, we can never know its complete story. The title Tomorrow, I walked to a dark black star, a line from a poem by Alfred Starr Hamilton (b. 1914–2005, Montclair, New Jersey), is also a found element in Dodge’s exhibition, chosen for the love of gaps in syntax between future and past tense, which highlights a feeling of disjuncture that motivates Jason Dodge to make artworks the way he does.

In addition to the Epilogue, Dodge has edited the exhibition catalogue of A Model, commissioning Mudam Director Bettina Steinbrügge to write an essay and the graphic designer Julie Peters to design it. 

Curators Bettina Steinbrügge with Sarah Beaumont, Clément Minighetti and Joel Valabrega