Artist Statement
My subject matter has varied, but my core interests have always revolved around using photo-based media to explore subjective experience. The thematic concerns I've engaged through my work—and revisited throughout my career, emphasizing and exploring them differently at different stages—include isolation, eros, mortality, and memory. To explore these themes, I've used subject matter ranging from cityscapes to the human body, and now, the family portraits of my more recent work. Process Statement
Over the course of my career, I've used whatever methods have suited my aesthetic purposes, including traditional and alternative darkroom techniques, Polaroid technology, video, and digital imaging. I'm now experimenting with intaglio processes.

 

 

Born to a family of booksellers in Montreal, Frank Rodick’s photo-based work engages the worlds of acute subjectivity and intense emotion. Coming from the intimacies of his life, his work is an elemental and primal meditation on trauma as seen through the experience of self, family and memory, refracted through the subconscious and and manifested in expressionistic representations of the human face and figure. Spanning 30 years, he has plied the photographic medium unconventionally, integrating analogue and digital photography with film and video, and drawing inspiration from multiple art forms, particularly painting and literature. In Rodick’s hands, the medium becomes not a recorder but, in his words, “an instrument of revelation and unveiling.” As he has written, “The images are my memoir—testimony verging on the hallucinations Céline spoke of: constructions, some shining, some terrible, in the end more real than the experience of everyday life.”

Concurrent to his art practice—and critical to its development—Rodick trained and worked as a psychotherapist for over 20 years, which expanded and deepened his sensibility for the essential issues and preoccupations of his own life, as well as the most private experiences of others. Mirroring the history of his own family, among the thousands of clients he encountered were those traumatized by experiences of abuse, illness, racism, and war.

Widely exhibited across four continents, Rodick’s work sits in permanent collections of more than twenty public institutions globally, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Brandts Museum of Denmark, The Kinsey Art Collection, the National Museum of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the National Gallery of Canada, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Yale University.

Books and monographs include: "Of Liquid Cities and Celestial Abattoirs"; "Liquid Cities (Alt Take)"; "Labyrinth of Desire: Work by Frank Rodick"; and "The Moons of Saturn."

In addition to studying cinema and photography, Rodick has degrees in political economy and psychology. Combining his psychology background with his art practice and teaching experience, he designed and teaches workshops focused on developing the creative process of working artists. He is also a writer whose essays have been named Editor’s Choice multiple times by Medium and Wordpress.

His most recently completed body of work, "The Moons of Saturn," was named the overall winner of 2021’s Pollux Awards.

 

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