Is the Hadron Collider – the world's largest particle accelerator presently being built deep beneath French soil - responsible for Adam Dodd's drawings in "Multiverses".   Or perhaps these pen and ink drawings owe their origin to KOMP, the Knock Out Mouse Project whereby mutant mice are injected with various flues and plagues.  According to Dodd, the content of his work could be equally ascribed to his early years of playing Nintendo, his biblical reading of Scientific American magazine or the cyberpunk influences of William Gibson's writings.  The mind reels.  And it is this whirling energy, the loose association of multiple sources, that allows Dodd to create his cosmologies of chaos while still anchoring the whole in structure and intuitive purpose. 

While Adam Dodd, a 2006 graduate of Emily Carr, is increasingly known for his large paintings with their mechanistic shaping of colour and form, it is in these more intimate drawings that his broad intellectual curiousities can come out and play.  While many of the pen and ink drawings in "Multiverses" feature a machine-like structure (whether boat or plane or submarine) these shapes are morphed with living elements and other objects to create a chaotic mass, at once vaguely dystopian (all those rats and disembodied hands) and messily human.  You wonder if those IBM workers hanging by a thread in "IBM Fish" know to where they are being reeled.  Or if the boatpeople in "All Hands on Deck" are headed for glory or doom (admittedly the skull and crossbones is not a good sign).  So there is much going on here, both on the page and in the overstimulated universe of Adam Dodd's imagination.  Yet to what effect?

I think Dodd is teasing himself as much as the viewer, pulling at loose strings to see what comes into focus.  In his artist's statement, Dodd speaks of the role of "intuition", releasing both himself and the viewer to an unmediated experience of his drawings.  In this way, these oddly constructed pieces are like Rorschach blots with more evidentiary clues to potentially guide our observations.  Make of them what you will, Dodd suggests.  I find this randomness a bit unnerving but that seems to be Dodd's point.  Unleashed, these inchoate worlds appear to be spinning out of control.  But if you pull back and consider the role of the artist - his god-like ability to create - you start to see how every world is subject to control.  But I doubt Adam Dodd himself has all the answers which makes the work in "Multiverses" all the more exciting.

Written by: Barry Dumka

Snap Contemporary Art

190 West 3rd Ave. 

The exhibition runs until June 5^th

Tel: (1) 604-319-1600
Email: gummotrash@gmail.com

Born in 1982, Cardiff, Wales, U.K
Lives and works in Vancouver, Canada


EDUCATION

2006 BFA: Fine Arts Major, Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver, BC.


SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2007 Multiverses, Snap Contemporary Art, Vancouver, BC.

2006 New Work By Adam Dodd, Little Mountain Studios, Vancouver, BC. Canada

2005 Fight or Flight, Soma, Vancouver, BC. Canada

2003 Drawings, Lucky's, Vancouver, BC.

2001 Shapes of Mind, Artspace, Prince George, BC. Canada


GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2007 Drawing Expo 07', The Gaff Gallery, Vancouver, BC.

2007 Vague Undertaking, The Chapel Gallery, Vancouver, BC.

2007 Psychoanylize This, Hasty Hawk, Vancouver, BC.

2007 A Self-Portrait Show, Midtown. Vancouver, BC.

2007 Merge, A collaboration show, Ayden Gallery

2007 One, Snap Contemporary Art, Vancouver, BC.

2006 Ritual, Snap Contemporary Art, Vancouver, BC.

2006 Bolo, (curated by Adam Dodd) Little Mountain Studios, Vancouver, BC.

2006 Satellite Goldrush, Maslianskis, Vancouver, BC.

2006 Emily Carr Grad Show 2006, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver, BC.

2006 stART Exhibition, Studio 21 Fine Art, Halifax, NS. Canada

2006 A St. Valentines Day Massacre, 156 W. Hastings, Vancouver, BC.

2005 Big Picture, Emily Carr Institute Concourse Gallery, Vancouver, BC.

2005 In Search of Pretty Plates, BLIM Gallery, Vancouver, BC.

2005 Monsterdinosaur vs. Screaming Eagles, Butchershop Gallery, Vancouver, BC.

2005 Math Class, Emily Carr Institute Concourse Gallery, Vancouver, BC.

2005 Art and Book Show, Lucky's, Vancouver, BC.

2004 Weave Me a Web, Emily Carr Institute Concourse Gallery, Vancouver, BC.

2004 The Miniature Show, Emily Carr Institute 2nd Floor, Vancouver, BC.

2004 Strangers in a Strange Land, The Butchershop Gallery, Vancouver, BC.


PUBLICATIONS:

2006 Emily Carr Institute (ECI), Viewbook 2006/07, 05.01

2006 Barnard,Elissa. "Sharing art school grads' work", The Chronicle Herald, Saturday, April 22, 2006.

2001 Peebles, Frank. "State of mind" B5, Prince George Free Press, Thursday, August 23, 2001


COLLECTIONS:

YVR Art Loan Collection