Jason Dodge

They Lifted Me into the Sun and Packed my Skull with Cinnamon is an exhibition by Jason Dodge that takes the form of an edition of six, shown in six venues simultaneously during the first week of November. Participating venues include: Galleria Franco Noero (Torino), Gilles Drouault Galerie/Multiples (Paris), More Publishers with Gevaert Editions (Brussels), Guimaraes (Vienna), and Akwa Ibom (Athens).

For the iteration in New York, hosted by Gern en Regalia, artist Torey Thornton generously accepted an invitation from Jason to interpret and actualize the installation.

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.

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.

For the Torino edition, Dodge invited gallery artist Giorgio Griffa to perform the installation, resulting in a unique collaboration of poetic vision. We wish to highlight and thank Griffa for his exceptional generosity in accepting Dodge's invitation and for his astute, thoughtful and elegant interpretation.