Frank Rodick is a photo-based artist working out of Toronto, Canada. He was born in Montreal to a family of booksellers, an environment that exposed him early on to the worlds of text and image. This would profoundly shape his relationship to narrative and the power of art to illuminate and deepen intimate human experience. This early immersion in the world of imagery, literature, and ideas established the foundation for an artistic practice that would probe the recesses of human consciousness and emotion, as well as exploring photography as a medium to render the acutely subjective.

Rodick’s formal education was broad and diverse. 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 University in Montreal and what is now the Toronto Metropolitan University. His psychology training would allow him to earn a living working as a counsellor and psychotherapist, giving him the freedom to develop his concurrent art practice as his instincts and experience led him. He remained the autodidact throughout, studying traditional photography and alternative printing techniques through books and experimentation in his personal darkroom. He would later apply the same trial and error methods to digital imaging.

The darkroom is where Rodick produced the series Liquid City, sub rosa, and then Arena, the latter based on combinations of alternative darkroom techniques, printing methods, and video. Faithless Grottoes (2006-2009) was his first series incorporating 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 intense subjectivity and 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.

International recognition came through regular exhibitions around the world, more than forty solo exhibitions 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 Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the New Mexico Museum of Art, Denmark's Brandts Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In addition to new work, Rodick is currently working on a major book project that will be both a retrospective of his career to date and a new encounter with his work as a whole.

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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.

Image: untitled self, no. 44, from the series Untitled Selves, ©Frank Rodick, 2017.