Review of New Work by Lois Dodd

John Yau, writing in Hyperallergic, has posted a review of new work by Lois Dodd.

“About William Carlos Williams’s most anthologized poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks said in their book, Understanding Poetry:

[…] reading this poem is like peering at an ordinary object through a pin prick in a piece of cardboard. The fact that the tiny hole arbitrarily frames the object endows it with an exciting freshness that seems to hover on the verge of revelation.

Had Warren and Brooks known of Lois Dodd’s paintings, I imagine they would have arrived at a similar conclusion, though I am inclined to think they would have revised the phrase, “arbitrarily frames the object.” That’s because there is nothing arbitrary about the way Dodd discovers her subject — the fusion of viewpoint and familiar object — in the routines of her everyday life. By framing these objects — a window, a clothesline, a cherry tree — in changing seasons and times of day, she finds ways to see her life anew, to celebrate the commonplace, while astutely probing the pressures modernism has placed on the picture plane.”