These three works are small scale images (digital chromogenic prints measuring 6 H x 8 W inches; 15 x 20 cm), each installed in its own unique hand crafted wooden case.

The titles come from "Molloy" by Samuel Beckett: "I am in my mother's room. It's I who live there now. I don't know how I got there."

The original photograph from which I constructed these images was made during my final visit to my parents' home of four decades, taken shortly after my father's death and my mother's institutionalization due to dementia.

Completed in 2010, each "Revisitations" image is a small scale digital chromogenic print installed in individually designed hand crafted wooden cases. To see the work within the wooden case, go to http://www.frankrodick.com/revisitations---frank-rodick.html.

The second and third panels of the triptych “Untitled” are drawn from a WWII image: a woman lynched by Nazis during their invasion of Russia, her body hanging in a deserted field, illuminated by, as it were, a fading light.

The piece “Three Studies for a Mouth” comprises three images, all representing states in extremis. The first uses a picture, from a WWI anti-war pamphlet, of a wounded soldier, his mouth mutilated. In the second panel, I reworked a picture of a person bound with a ball gag, a device associated with sadomasochistic sex. The last image is my father, one hour after his death.

Consisting of fourteen images, the series "Masquerade" (2011) is the second iteration of the "sub rosa" series, which I originally completed in 1997. For the complete series, see http://www.frankrodick.com/masquerade---frank-rodick.html.

The source imagery for "Masquerade" is the same as it was for sub rosa: a set of photographs made using corrupted Polaroid film. In Masquerade, I used digital imaging techniques to create a colour treatment of the subject.

"Faithless Grottoes" is a series of 15 large scale digital chromogenic prints, most of them multi-image. I completed them between 2006 and 2008.

In his curatorial statement for a 2007 exhibition, Don Snyder, Dean of Image Arts at Ryerson University, wrote:

"The images [from Faithless Grottoes] are frenetic, even psychedelic. The photographs appear almost as stills of moving images, due to the repetition, shifts of colour, and video quality of Rodick’s technique. Electric blue and glowing orange dominate the palette. Bodies and faces take over the frame, emerging from black voids. The expressions are difficult to read: are they raging with intense pain or pleasure? The ambiguity is captured in the title of one of Rodick’s pieces: "In pain there burns a secret joy." The faces stare out at the viewer or close their eyes in seeming ecstasy – but all are in double vision."

"Arena" (completed between 2002 and 2005) consists of 15 individual works, some of them multi-image.

Of this work, Stephen Perloff (founder and editor of The Photo Review) has written:

"Pain and pleasure, sex and procreation, dissolution and death all appear in the Arena photographs—not as opposites, but as a continuum, a dialectic in which each condition is inherent in the other. As in Mr Rodick’s other series, Liquid City and sub rosa, the Arena images obscure reality and force viewers to confront what they think they know and to reimagine the world and their own experience. While one can find art historical precedents of his Arena series in Bosch, Velazquez, and Goya, Mr Rodick’s spiritual forebears are equally Werner Heisenberg and Franz Kafka.



In its source material, the painstaking craftsmanship of its printing, its scale (large, yet still human and not overwhelming) and its presentation as single images, diptychs, triptychs, etc. Arena pushes through the boundaries of traditional photography into something new and spontaneous. It partakes of the multimedia approaches of much contemporary art while confronting the distanced intellectualism of some of that art with white-hot emotionalism."

To see the entire series, go to http://www.frankrodick.com/arena---frank-rodick.html.

Consisting of 13 images, I created the "sub rosa" series (1995-1997) using a combination of corrupted Polaroid film and traditional silver printing. You can see the entire series at http://www.frankrodick.com/sub-rosa---frank-rodick.html. Fourteen years later I reworked this series into "Masquerade."

My first body of work, I created the 40 images of "Liquid City" between 1991 and 1999. You can view the entire series at http://www.frankrodick.com/liquid-city---frank-rodick.html.

In his book "The Photograph," Graham Clarke wrote: "The postmodern condition, perhaps, is that every city will begin, as far as the photograph is concerned, to look the same. Every image will be untitled: the postmodern city will not so much be a place as a condition; and to capture that condition will be the challenge for the camera."

Over time I've come to consider "Liquid City" an address to Clarke’s challenge. With these images I worked to capture the visual complexity of the city as a personal experience as opposed to a specific location.