TRACY DODS CONTEMPORARY PAINTINGS
Soho Annex South and All THE BEST EXHIBITION
After
an interval spent creating several series of commissioned works, Tracy Dods
returns to exhibiting this October. In The Expedition, at Sydney's Soho
Galleries, she further develops her theme of the journey through corporate
anguish and clearly identifies it as a metaphor for wider social isolation.
The
exhibition of twenty-five major acrylics on large canvas elicits haunting
suggestions of malfunction in the western business lifestyle. "But it's more than just corporate anguish
and implied suicide. It's really a
representation of the loneliness which surrounds us all today, which we seem
scarcely even to notice anymore", says Dods.
"Society is making us all so completely separate that I believe we're
close to losing an understanding of how to be, and behave as, a community. Media messages constantly instruct us to be
individuals. We obey, and so it becomes
a self-fulfilling prophecy. We're lost
and anxious and we see social distress all around us and we project that this
must be the way we're supposed to live now.
It isn't".
She
styles herself a symbolist – this is her fourth show on this theme. Her worn out corporate monoliths invariably
clutch briefcases limply by their sides.
Water laps against expensive designer shoes. Comb-overs fly wearily in the breeze. By placing these agonized figures inside a
panoramic beach format, Dods perceptively suggests either a dramatically large,
or sometimes a smaller and understated, expression of impotence in this
characteristically essential element of Australian life. Either way, it works powerfully and she
paints them as if they are observed remotely, like a body you might unthinkingly
step over on a pavement. And thus she
invites the viewer to consider society's general absence of empathy.
"It
started one Friday evening when I watched what seemed like a herd of
businessmen at 5.00 pm, homeward bound for the weekend and looking unimaginably
depressed". Her theme became a complete
symbol of a nine to five, cradle to grave male condition, leading to a life one
hardly knows how to live.
Dods is considering varying her theme for
future exhibitions to include the drabness of urban building design and has
started painting this subject matter.
For now, though, it remains focused on the beach and the allure of
water.
