Frank Rodick

Labyrinth of Desire:  Work by Frank Rodick

March 13^th, 2010 to April 24^th, 2010

Artist and Curator in Conversation: Sunday, March 14^th at 1 pm

Deborah Colton Gallery is pleased to announce a mid-career exhibition and book surveying the photo-based work of Canadian artist Frank Rodick at Colton & Farb Gallery, Houston. Labyrinth of Desire:  Work by Frank Rodick, offers an extraordinary look into the creative process of one of the field’s most interesting artists and will feature selections from his several bodies of work, from the early black-and-white images in Liquid City and sub rosa to the multiple, toned images of Arena and Faithless Grottoes. The artist’s most recent multi-media work will be shown here for the first time in a special installation within the exhibition. The exhibition is timed to coincide with the Houston-based FotoFest, founded in 1983 as the first international biennial of photography and photo-based art in the United States.

Rodick, an internationally recognized artist whose work was last seen in the United States at the Deborah Colton Gallery – in the 2008 group show Reflections and the 2007 solo show The Longest Night — creates powerful, evocative, and sometimes controversial pictures that integrate elements of traditional photography, alternative darkroom techniques, video, and digital imaging.

In his more recent work, Rodick alters and combines images into sequenced compositions that explore the complex realm of the human psyche, probing the ambiguity of our inner lives. His juxtaposition of images mimics the imprecise and non-linear workings of our private thoughts, memories, and desires. “Hallucinatory as they might sometimes seem,” Rodick says of his work, “what I’m looking for are images that feel more intimately real than our cursory experience of everyday life, images that give a voice to the worlds that live inside us and which somehow demand witness.”

Rodick’s work has been exhibited widely throughout North America, Latin America, and Europe. His work is in the collections of numerous institutions in the United States, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum, and the Kinsey Institute. Internationally, his work is in the collections of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa; the Musée de la Photographie à Charleroi in Belgium; the Museet for Fotokunst in Denmark; and the Museo Nacional de Bella Artes de Buenos Aires in Argentina.

The curator for the exhibition is Katherine Ware, formerly a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, who is now Curator of Photography at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has organized exhibitions of work by contemporary photographers as well as by masters such as Harry Callahan, Man Ray, and László Moholy-Nagy. Ware’s publications include Dreaming in Black and White: Photography at the Julien Levy Gallery, Elemental Landscapes: The Photographs of Harry Callahan; In Focus: Man Ray; In Focus: László Moholy-Nagy; and essays on Man Ray, Bauhaus photography, and contemporary photography. She first encountered Rodick’s work at FotoFest in Houston and subsequently chose his work for the 2006 exhibition Discoveries of the Meeting Place. “Rodick’s relentless examination of the inner workings of the human animal never ceases to intrigue me,” Ware said. “Despite the valiant work of Dr. Freud and some of his successors, our emotional landscapes remain relatively mysterious and uncharted.”

A publication surveying Rodick’s career, with an essay by the curator, will be published by the gallery in conjunction with the exhibition.

Colton & Farb Gallery is part of Deborah Colton Gallery, which is founded on being an innovative showcase for ongoing presentation and promotion of strong historical and visionary contemporary artists world-wide, whose diverse practices include painting, works on paper, sculpture, video, photography, performance and conceptual future media installations.