The photographs appear almost as stills of moving images, due to the repetition, shifts of colour, and video quality of Rodick’s technique. Electric blue and glowing orange dominate the palette. Bodies and faces take over the frame, emerging from black voids. The expressions are difficult to read: are they raging with intense pain or pleasure? The ambiguity is captured in the title of one of Rodick’s pieces: “In pain there burns a secret joy”. The faces stare out at the viewer or close their eyes in seeming ecstasy – but all are in double vision. Rodick writes, “As hallucinatory as they may seem, what I’m striving for are images that feel more intimately real than our cursory experience of everyday life, and that give voice to the inner worlds that exist in each of us.”
—Professor Don Snyder, chair of Image Arts, Ryerson University, and Melodie Ng, co-curators of Three Constructions of the Image, 2007, writing about Rodick’s work from Faithless grottoes.
The French philosopher and literary revolutionary George Bataille once stated, “Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and ecstatic love”. Rodick unveils our primal urges in his courageous and profound exploration of the intimacies of Eros within the context of taboo; at once sacred and forbidden. As Rodick unravels image after image, appropriated from existing video stills and other sources, he laboriously and meticulously reworks each photograph, imbuing the work with a multiplicity of depth and lushness. Utilizing traditional and historic photographic processes, gelatin silver printing and iron and copper toning, a delicate 19th century romantic aesthetic is created, seducing the viewer into an intense and trancelike introspection of both self and other and the boundaries where they unite and divide. . . . Eroticism is restored to its original portrayal in antiquity, equated with cosmic force and divinity. Rodick takes us by the hand through this dense, dark labyrinth of many paradoxes—pain and joy, violence and release, laughter and tenderness, power and pleasure, masculine and feminine—as we can be ultimately liberated through participation in this visceral metamorphosis.
—Marcia Mercadante, curator of The Longest Night, solo exhibition of work by Frank Rodick at Deborah Colton Gallery, 2007.
. . . Frank Rodick’s work from the series Arena delves into the gripping and mysterious realm of human emotion. As people, our lives are necessarily rooted in chemistry as we experience the world with our bodies; but the feelings evoked by these corporeal experiences are far more difficult to grasp. Fear, laughter, passion, love – all are beyond explaining and yet are ordinary experiences shared by us all.
As familiar as they are, these primal responses are highly complex and not mutually distinct. Using blurred, truncated views of the human form, Rodick taps into the powerful ambiguities of pleasure and pain in his images, forcing us to examine our untidy interiors. Inside each of us, he suggests, is a heart of darkness, a core that isn’t rational, civilized, or predictable. Rodick’s images bring us into direct confrontation with that physiological self which is, for many, frightening and forbidden -- yet so fascinating it compels our gaze.
Using multiple imagery and blurring, Rodick emulates the non-linear and sometimes hallucinogenic nature of human sensation. His disjunctive image sequencing also echoes the transitory, layered quality of our emotions. Reinforcing this effect are the titles of his pieces, which, instead of offering clarity, add a further dimension of ambiguity. In this body of work, Rodick has boldly tackled with his camera a subject both fleeting and inchoate, with haunting results. Ultimately each viewer is left alone with an intensity of experience he must interpret for himself.
—Katherine Ware, Curator of Photographs, Philadelphia Museum of Art, from her curatorial statement for the Discoveries Exhibition at FotoFest International 2006.
The Arena photographs take us inside the Dionysian experience, into the skin of people in the state of ecstasy. But in the world Rodick imagines, the god has fled the field, the rituals practiced in his name have become barren, and those who would worship him are mere fornicators. The lost souls that inhabit Arena set out on a quest for self-transcendence, but having reached that exalted state, they find themselves drowning in emptiness.... Difficult terrain, this—for viewer and artist alike. One’s first response is to flinch, to turn away. I take one look and ask Do I really want these images lodged in my brain? Once you’ve crossed into the mysteries of life and death, can you get a return ticket?
—Nancy Brokaw, from her article “Sex, Death, and Videotape” published in The Photo Review, Spring 2006.
Rodick’s photographs are lacunas, gaping oral memories of what takes place inside and between bodies. Regardless of subject matter, rodick’s images are not concerned with despair and dissolution alone but are equally concerned with the opposite: ecstasy. . . . Rodick’s photographs marry these two and destroy the polarity between them. . . . his work is an argument, a moral one, against solipsism. We may be alone, nestled in our briar-batch hovel howling for answers, but we are all howling together. It is this collective voice, tuned upon melody, that lifts our cries toward euphoric song. Each of the images in the show puts forth a compelling argument of this framework, each united by the tissues which make upour hopes and our fears. . . .
Rodick’s photographs are punishing. However, it is clear from the bravery of the work that he has also punished himself, excavating and spooling memory into a kaleidoscope of moments which suggest a Bosch-like orgy of the life experience: sex, laughter, pain, television, books, words, blood, stars, clocks, hands, hair, teeth, fluids, water, paper, stones, statuary, women, children, men, loss, death, rebirth. Time eviscerates our memories and us, we dissolve into that from which we first began and through this fleeting evaporation, we take up a spanner to clear our way through all the detritus. Is it possible to describe work which wrestles with questions such as these? He is excavating bodies in order to uncover the fluid beneath.
—Bob Black, from the article “Life’s Lacuna: The Vanishing Pleasure Dome,” artpost.ca, June 2005.
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 antecedents of his Arena series in Bosch, Velazquez, and Goya, Mr Rodick’s spiritual forbears 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
excerpts from selected writings on Frank Rodick’s work
