Confetti Aeroplanes Print

"Asking a visual artist to describe their work is like asking an author to paint a picture of their book." Christian James Dodd is a multidisciplinary artist interested in themes of distortion, contradiction, futility and inevitability. His work encompasses drawing, painting, print, cyanotype, polaroid and digital photography, image manipulation using a variety of media such as oil, acrylic, pen and ink, pencil, pastel, marker, collage, crayon and found images, maps, charts, texts, books, stencils etc. Previous collections of works have explored themes such as advertising, infantile images and compositions inspired by illustrations in Ladybird books and their relationship to pop art. The enduring appeal of reflective surfaces and shiny objects in a world of mechanised production and the human mind’s tendency to attempt to find order in random or chaotic systems (pareidolia). In his latest series of works the composition of the slide puzzle or eight puzzle is used to obscure, reveal and reconfigure multiple images concerned with all the previous themes which are all present in a single space and either incompatible or inevitable in their repetition. The slide puzzle layout, reminiscent of the ubiquitous user interface design seen in many applications, encourages reconfiguration, ordering and sortation to achieve pleasing or satisfactory outcomes but is a very limited method of handling complex subjects. Like the demand of computational logic that all vague, ambiguous, romantic or esoteric artefacts be describable, quantifiable in either numbers or words is flawed so these images are flawed by the rigid framework within which they are represented. This framework challenges the viewer to order and sort without ever achieving a fully coherent outcome or always receiving an unsatisfactory one. The past may be incompatible with the present, the scientific with the spiritual, the corporate goal with the romantic ideal, the materialistic aim with the mortal inevitability. The 3 x 3 grid of the slide puzzle contains 362,880 possible configurations half of which are achievable within the limited movements of a slide puzzle. These pieces can be configured in all possible positions and may conceal images and messages within any of them. Layers, outlines, surfaces, finishes, textures, reliefs may be made up of paint, ink, collage, pencil, pen, crayon, pastel, acrylic, varnish etc.