Frank Rodick’s honest and unflinching approach to difficult themes sets his images apart from much contemporary work. As photographic practice has become increasingly self-reflexive and imitative—with dramatized, narrative tableau imagery occupying much of the center stage in the photographic art world—the originality and strength of Rodick’s approach is that it bypasses this way of working, and instead grounds itself in the complex realms of visual layering, color and texture relationships, dramatic tension and philosophical metaphor…[Rodick has] strikingly blended personal experience with larger issues of existence, family, memory and mortality. In many respects, Rodick’s photographs address the same human problems that so preoccupied artist such as Goya and Francis Bacon.
—Don Snyder, curator and Professor Emeritus, Toronto Metropolitan University

Frank Rodick was born in Montreal to a family of booksellers, an environment that profoundly shaped his relationship with narrative and the power of art to illuminate and deepen intimate human experience. This early immersion in the world of literature and ideas established the foundation for an artistic practice that would later probe the recesses of human consciousness and emotion, and explore photography as a medium to render the invisible territories of the psyche into tangible form.

Rodick’s formal education was—overworked as the term may be—eclectic. Early studies in math and science were followed by degrees in political economy and then graduate work in counselling psychology. During this time Rodick also studied cinema and photography at Concordia and what is now the Metropolitan University of Toronto. His psychology training would allow him to sustain a living working as a psychotherapist, giving him the freedom to develop his art practice as his instincts and experience led him. Throughout, he remained the autodidact, studying traditional photography and alternative printing techniques through books and experimentation in his personal darkroom. He would apply the same trial and error method to digital imaging, all of which contributed to technical approaches that others have described as unique in the medium.

The darkroom is where Rodick produced the series Liquid City, sub rosa, and then Arena, the latter based on combinations of alternative printing methods and video. Faithless Grottoes (2006-2009) was his first series that incorporated digital technologies. This practice, alongside the incorporation of vernacular photography, continued into the series that are associated with Rodick’s expressionistic exploration of intimate family histories: Revisitations, I live there now, Frances, Everything Will Be Forgotten, and The Last Words of Joseph. These were followed by the self-portraits of Untitled Selves, and then the series that would win the Pollux Prize and be made into a book by the same title: The Moons of Saturn

The worlds engaged in Rodick’s images come from acute subjectivity and intense emotion, addressing issues that are both elemental and primal: fear, mortality, and trauma, all filtered through the lens of memory and the unconscious. His concurrent work as a therapist provided shared experience with the intimate lives of others while simultaneously expanding and deepening his sensibility for the obsessions of his own life. Among his thousands of clients were individuals transformed by experiences of abuse, sickness, bigotry, and war—experiences that resonated with his own family history and helped inform artistic explorations of collective and individual pain.

International recognition came through regular exhibitions around the world, more than 40 solo and over fifty group shows to date. His work is included in private and public collections, including institutions such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires, Yale University, and Denmark's Brandts Museum.

In addition to new work, Rodick is currently working on a book that will be a retrospective of his career to date.

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