“Pain and pleasure, sex and procreation, dissolution and death all appear in the Arena photographs—not as opposites, but as a continuum, a dialectic in which each condition is inherent in the other. As in Mr Rodick’s other series, Liquid City and sub rosa, the Arena images obscure reality and force viewers to confront what they think they know and to reimagine the world and their own experience. While one can find art historical precedents of his Arena series in Bosch, Velazquez, and Goya, Mr Rodick’s spiritual forebears are equally Werner Heisenberg and Franz Kafka.

In its source material, the painstaking craftsmanship of its printing, its scale (large, yet still human and not overwhelming) and its presentation as single images, diptychs, triptychs, etc. Arena pushes through the boundaries of traditional photography into something new and spontaneous. It partakes of the multimedia approaches of much contemporary art while confronting the distanced intellectualism of some of that art with white-hot emotionalism."

—Stephen Perloff, editor and founder of The Photo Review, 2003