Jason Dodge
They Lifted Me Into the Sun Again and Packed My Skull With Cinnamon, 2020

Installation (posters, white paint, Marigold, shopping list, poster for lost falcon)
Variable dimensions
Edition of 6

The exhibition begins with the artist not being there, in all the different ways that “not there” can mean.
Absence becomes a component of the show, which the title, borrowed from a poem by Thomas James
titled “Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh XXI Dynasty,” further highlights. The poem charts the
ultimate presence of absence, death, as a complex entanglement of the corporeal and the spiritual. The
narrator describes their own mummification process, described impartially as an emptying and filling
method that treats the body as an aesthetic, artistic object. While within the poem’s bounds, the spirit
remains mostly autonomous, Dodge’s exhibition negotiates a spiritual, also authorial presence that actively involves others in its corporeal becoming. A set of specific items: 20 Bayer Aspirin advertisements, a missing animal flyer, loose Marigold petals, batteries, forks, and fabric, and a found shopping list, is sent to each space to be installed following instructions sent electronically by the artist. Within this set of instructions is the conversational, improvisational, and accumulative employment of different practices, other bodies, and touches, the exhibition’s own poetics is animated through a series of choices akin to the translator’s entanglement in a poem. In each incarnation of this exhibition Dodge asks someone to perform the installation as a surrogate. Dancer and choreographer Alix Eynaudi has composed a score to follow in order to install all of the exhibitions. The score addresses the buying of the items listed in the shopping list and to unpack them in the room; things understood firstly as products to be consumed inside the body, applied outside the body, and to clean what the body uses.

Excerpt from the introduction text to Dodge’s exhibition “They lifted me into the sun again And packed my skull with cinnamon” at Galerie Gilles Drouault, Paris, 2020.