Jason Dodge - They lifted me into the sun again and packed my skull with cinnamon
of 6, with a signed and numbered certificate
"They lifted me into the sun again and packed my skull with cinnamon" is an exhibition as an edition of six shown in six venues simultaneously during the last week of October and the first week of November. Participating venues include MOREpublishers with Gevaert Editions (Brussels), Guimaraes (Vienna), Akwa Ibom (Athens), Gern en Regalia (NYC), Gilles Drouault galerie/multiples (Paris), and Galleria Franco Noero (Torino).
The exhibition begins with the artist not being there, in all the different ways that "not there" can mean. Absence becomes a component of the show, which the title, borrowed from a poem by Thomas James titled "Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh XXI Dynasty," further highlights. The poem charts the ultimate presence of absence, death, as a complex entanglement of the corporeal and the spiritual. The narrator describes their own mummification process, described impartially as an emptying and filling method that treats the body as an aesthetic, artistic object. While within the poem's bounds, the spirit remains mostly autonomous, Dodge's exhibition negotiates a spiritual, also authorial presence that actively involves others in its corporeal becoming. A set of specific items: 20 Bayer Aspirin advertisements, a missing animal flyer, loose Marigold petals, batteries, forks, and fabric, and a found shopping list, is sent to each space to be installed following instructions sent electronically by the artist. Within this set of instructions is the; conversational, improvisational, and accumulative, employment of different practices, other bodies, and touches, the exhibition's own poetics is animated through a series of choices akin to the translator's entanglement in a poem. In each incarnation of this exhibition Dodge has asked someone to perform the installation as a surrogate, here in Brussels the installation was performed by Tom Engels.
The dancer and choreographer Alix Eynaudi has composed a score to follow in order to install all of the exhibitions. The score addresses the buying of the items listed in the shopping list and to unpack them in the room; things understood firstly as products to be consumed inside the body, applied outside the body, and to clean what the body uses. Unrelated to randomness, but open to interpretation, this show builds on Dodge's previous habit of inviting friends and colleagues to lend titles and texts to his exhibitions, but here inspires a freer movement in a conversation with things, an improvisation using a shared score that is not concluded by a single iteration.
"They lifted me into the sun again and packed my skull with cinnamon" was on view from 20.10.2020 till 15.12.2020, by appointment only.
At Saskia Gevaert Editions (Rue du Chapeau 10, BE- 1070 Brussels)
