Born and raised in Montreal, and now based in Toronto, Frank Rodick is visual artist whose work has progressively integrated traditional and alternative photography with video and digital imaging. Before embarking on a full time career in the arts, he studied politics, economics, and psychology, doing graduate work in the latter and practicing as a psychotherapist.

His first body of photographic work was the set of 40 images entitled Liquid City, completed during the years 1991 to 1999. In these photographs Rodick reimagined the contemporary city as a personal vision and state of mind, as opposed to a specific location. During the 1995-97 period, Rodick completed another series, entitled sub rosa in which he explored a traditional subject—the nude figure—using nontraditional processes, including Polaroid technology, to aesthetically fuse elements of ambiguity, tension, and mystery. In 2002, Rodick completed the first set of works from Arena, a project that attracted critical praise from a number of quarters. In 2006, Katherine Ware, then curator of photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, stated that the Arena images “bring us into direct confrontation with that physiological self which is, for many, frightening and forbidden -- yet so fascinating it compels our gaze” and that “Rodick has boldly tackled with his camera a subject both fleeting and inchoate, with haunting results.” Similar in spirit to Arena, Rodick’s next project, entitled Faithless Grottoes, took his work in a number of new directions. It incorporated digital technology, an expanded color palette, and much larger scale imagery. His current and ongoing project is a set of images entitled Revisitations, which radically redirects the scale of his work and engages the use of wooden enclosures as an integral part of the works themselves.

Noted public collections that have acquired Frank Rodick’s work include those of the following institutions: the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum; the National Museum of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires; the Museet for Fotokunst in Denmark; the Museum of Photography in Charleroi, Belgium; Lehigh University Art Galleries; the Kinsey Institute Art Collection, and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. His work is also part of W.M. Hunt’s acclaimed private collection, The Dancing Bear. A complete list of public collections can be found on this web site in the cv section.

More recently, Rodick’s work was the subject of a mid-career survey entitled Labyrinth of Desire, curated by Katherine Ware and hosted at the Colton & Farb Gallery in Houston during that city’s FotoFest 2010. A catalogue with an essay by Ms Ware accompanied the exhibition. You can see a pdf version of the catalogue here and order your own copy through the Deborah Colton Gallery.

Trace the nerves, under the permeable skin the hungering flesh, to an architecture of bone, all the abrupt transitions of self — to nothing, and the fact of that incomprehensible absence is what animates Frank Rodick's work, out on the furthest edges of consciousness. . . . The brutal and beautiful work of Frank Rodick touches on the darkest themes of our existence, the deepest shadows brought reluctantly into the light.

Darren Campion, From the Interior: Frank Rodick.