Jason Dodge at Casey Kaplan Gallery
In many ways a gallery is a stage, lacking only a proscenium and seats. In the case of conceptual artist Jason Dodge, there are acts and there are props, and art emerges between them. For his recent exhibition ‘We Are the Meeting’, Dodge presented us with off-stage events, evidence of suspicious acts, and charismatic objects that connected the aesthetic moment of a gallery visit with an event of significant symbolic order. What appears at first to be a random selection of mundane objects with no correlation to one another, or to any system of implied meaning, begins to reveal layers of narrative verging on the dramaturgical. Dodge is not altogether concerned with providing an experience of clear-cut artistic value; his works do not 'look like' art but more like specimens of evidence at a crime scene or an archeological dig; they are models for the advancement of a form of social anthropology. The first room holds a lightning rod, pointing nor