Alas, even in this distant island refuge of the soul, the dark pattern hath found me.
Alex Dodge’s solo show at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery includes five new paintings made in the artist’s Tokyo studio. The show’s title references UX designer Harry Brignull’s term “Dark Patterns,” used to describe user interface designs that are intentionally deceptive, misleading, or manipulative. These works obliquely look to the ways that modern society and global capitalism use digital systems to both create connectivity and produce influence.
The repetitive patterns in these new paintings define the form of draped textiles, a gesture that has been persistent in Dodge’s work throughout the past two decades. While these mysterious covered shapes act as a formal device, Dodge maintains that they are also a metaphor for the seemingly neutral and agnostic structure of the digital systems that are overlaid upon our physical world. The artist’s’ execution of painting with stencils in thick oils with exacting precision but visceral effect is a partial act of defiance against or reconciliation with a world marginalized by devices; each disposable, replaceable, and clad in indistinguishably flat polished glass, smudged with the grease of a longing humanity. Dodge doubts the neutrality of technology writ large, and believes that the patterns alone contain something from the start that affects us, tips the hand, or nudges us. Dodge shows us, in carefully and meticulously crafting his paintings, that how we do things is as important as what we do.
New vocabulary appears in these works. Increasingly thick relief elements make up borders and frames, slumping over the stretcher bars. Part collage, part oozing deposits of dripping paint, these elements take the shape of fried eggs, patches, or band-aids. Dodge refers to them as “kludges.” They are physical and graphical patches that haphazardly hold the structure and composition of the images together.
Some themes from previous work are revisited, such as synthetic animals and furry characters, pennant streamers, and American flags. The headlining work, titled Dark Pattern, features a tower of draped American flags alternating in positive and inverted colors. The well-known optical phenomenon of the afterimage creates an inverse version of the artwork with the same colors—an admission of the deeply polarized political extremes at play in America.
Alex Dodge lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and Takao, Japan. He has shown in institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio; the RISD Museum, Providence, RI, the Fleming Museum of Art in Burlington, Vermont; The Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas; The Bucksbaum Center for the Arts at Grinnell College in Iowa; In addition to multiple solo exhibitions at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery since 2006, recent solo exhibitions include BB&M Gallery in Seoul, South Korea (2023); Maki Fine Arts in Tokyo, Japan (2021); The Faro Collection in Tokyo, Japan (2021); and Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton, NY (2024). His work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; the MFA Boston; the Pizzuti Collection at the Columbus Museum of Art; The New York Public Library; the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Jundt Art Museum, WA; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, CA; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS.
