(For a less formal, slightly lengthier biography, see “No Maggot Lonely: Thoughts from a Life in Art” Counter Arts, June 2021.)

Born to a family of booksellers in Montreal, Frank Rodick’s photo-based work engages the worlds of acute subjectivity and emotion. Coming from the intimacies of his life, the issues are elemental and primal: fear, mortality, and pain, as seen through the lens of memory and the subconscious, images manifested in expressionistic representations of the human face and figure. Spanning 30 years, he has plied the photographic medium in his own singular way, integrating analogue and digital photography with film and video, and drawing inspiration from multiple art forms, particularly painting, literature, and cinema.

Concurrent to his art practice—and critical to its development—Rodick trained and worked as a psychotherapist for over 20 years, which expanded and deepened his sensibility for the essential issues and obsessions of his own life, as well as the most private experiences of others. Mirroring the history of his own family, among the thousands of clients he encountered were those traumatized by experiences of abuse, illness, bigotry, and war.

Rodick has described his work as "jagged memoir—testimony verging on hallucination, the kind Céline spoke of: constructions, some shining. other fearsome, but in the end more real than the everyday life that dampens rather than exclaims."

Widely exhibited across four continents in over 35 solo and 80 group exhibitions, Rodick’s work sits in permanent collections of more than twenty public institutions globally, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Brandts Museum of Denmark, The Kinsey Art Collection, the National Museum of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the National Gallery of Canada, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Yale University.

Books and monographs include: Of Liquid Cities and Celestial Abattoirs; Liquid Cities (Alt Take); Labyrinth of Desire: Work by Frank Rodick; and, published in 2023, The Moons of Saturn, with text by Nancy Brokaw and images from his series by the same title.

In addition to studying cinema and photography, Rodick has degrees in political economy and psychology. Combining the psychology background with his art practice and teaching experience, he designs and teaches workshops focused on enhancing the creative process of working artists. He is also a writer whose essays have been named Editor’s Choice multiple times by Medium and Wordpress.

Rodick’s most recent work, The Moons of Saturn, was named the overall winner of 2021’s Pollux Awards.