Frank Rodick — artist statement untitled selves

The Long Season of Untitled Selves

Frank Rodick, 2018

This statement was written for the exhibition Untitled Selves: New Work by Frank Rodick, curated by Don Snyder for The School of Image Arts, Toronto Metropolitan University, 2018.

Inwards, as if into the distance.
— Lou Andreas-Salomé

It lasted years, not months; and during that long season of falling apart I watched those last waves of stardust sweep through my parents, breaking them into pieces. It took long enough never to stop, and so little time it was ash before it began.

That was my season for watching, and I forgot how to sleep. I did things I'd never done, like make pictures of that sorry little trio we'd always been. First came the pictures of my mother, Frances. A few years’ work on that, then the portraits of Joseph, my father, a lonely man who grieved he might not outlive us all.

Squeezed in there somewhere was another discovery: old snapshots packed into one more old shoebox, three pictures of a smooth-bellied four year old boy standing naked in a bathtub. The boy was gone, but I'd been taught to recognize him as me. I blew up that thin white body, wrang him inside out. I christened my churnings with flash powder and cold water, and called the pictures everything will be forgotten.

There were times I grandly imagined myself some Nietzschean figure (less embarrassing now than I’d have thought) watching death do its dirty work—as played out in ICUs and dementia wards where ancient women played with dolls and screamed of Auschwitz. But all I managed, really, was to keep my eyes open. And take notes that were tattoos. I paid attention because I thought it was my duty—I could never shed myself of that, more embarrassing than the Nietzsche business—and because I was curious, though exhausted. And because it dawned on me that here might be a vein worth mining. Artists—I've imagined myself one of those too—are monsters.

I'm sure that during this long season something broke inside me, just like the capacity for sleep I’ve never recovered. Whatever that thing was, I know it wasn't whole in the first place. It was shot through with enough corrosion that a sour breath could make it crumble.

Maybe that's how I wound up making these pictures, my untitled selves.

untitled self, no. 6, 2017

I’m lying; it was symmetry, no, sloth and symmetry, that got me going. I wanted pictures that would go neatly with the Frances and Joseph portraits. A tidy three-legged table, nice on exhibition walls and book pages, something that mirrored our little band. Mother, father, singleton.

I started there and the pictures were awful. Well, of course. All wrong, stuffed with flotsam. Not embarrassing, just hopeless. Creating a story—even something hallucinatory, gossamer-thin, and those are the kinds of things I like—was wrong, because there was no story.

I was spent. So, how do you make make pictures of spent? How do you make pictures of broken? Stupid question, you don't know how.

Eight months after completing untitled selves, I found this quote from John Gray:

Who we are is something other than what we think. And that something is unknowable. So how do you ever represent that? A blank space? Maybe. Dots on a page coming together and flying apart? Maybe that too.

There was less of me after that long season. A wind tunnel comes to mind. Not that I was living in one, but that I was one: a vacant, turbulent space, where undefinable bits of this and that crashed into each other, coagulating for a quantum moment, then flying apart.

Sometimes one of those nebulous clusters would look familiar, like a feeling I recognized, or a state of mind, or a maybe (even) a sense of self, something with a name perhaps: bewilderment, fear, hate, resignation, nausea, elation, aloneness, and, yes, death. But the labels disintegrated even before things came apart again, leaving me not somewhere else, but someone else. Or nobody at all.

It’s obvious that this thing we call identity isn’t made of concrete. But what that season of falling apart brought home was more elemental: that who we think we are is transient and impermanent to the point of pure illusion.

Cutting was a relief.

To scrape, and winnow away the surfaces, to scratch out eyes and seal mouths shut, to blow things up, scatter them like powder. All of it a relief, though it took effort.

Three years earlier I’d done a dry run for this process with the everything will be forgotten and season of mists pictures. I made those images subtractively, chipping away at a plain of black surface to find what was below. Like sculpting. Was it a coincidence that these earlier works were also self-portraits—unlike the portraits of Joseph and Frances, where the process was practically opposite? I doubt it, though I can’t tell you why.

Colour—gone. Ideas for text came from vanity and I take credit for giving up on that. I threw or crippled the conventional elements of portrait: background, pose, lighting, context, objects. What wasn't there was as definitional as anything that was. What was there was as absent definition as what wasn’t. What was left I could move around as I pleased, like the white sands I remember those monks in Kyoto gently pushing with their rakes.

I sometimes say that my work beginning with the Frances pictures (earlier actually, with revisitations) are an "alternative family album." But there's nothing in those last self-portraits that returns to my family, at least not directly. I’ve wondered if I'm declaring rejection using that most deprecating of methods (in photography and life): erasure. Yes, probably, though that’s not all of it.

And yet. The images remain clearly married to the human face, which along with the figure, have always been my work. How's that? A man not quite ready to leave this world? Yes, though the threads are thinner. Looking not only for what's gone, but also for what's left? Yes, that too.

Fear of leaving everything behind? Yes, I think so.

More tenuous, but I still felt part of this world. Not a resident, more an actor in this strange production…. A dusty traveller, passing through.