The Ranch, in collaboration with Sprüth Magers, is delighted to present Lucy Dodd’s solo show The End from November 9–December 20, 2024.

The first installment of a two-part presentation collectively entitled In Between Worlds, this exhibition features paintings and found sculpture exploring the personal, mythological, and historical connections between the artist’s two homes, the United States and the United Kingdom. Part One comprises a series of paintings Dodd executed outdoors on a platform overlooking the forest in Kingston , New York at the tail end of fall in 2023, as well as a tree sculpture that first appeared to the artist years prior in a vision and which uncannily resurfaced in these arboreal surrounds. The show’s thanatological title signals to the closing of Dodd’s New York chapter. As the artist recollects: “It bookends eleven years of working/making and exhibition in New York. Ending on the island where I was born and Montauk being the literal End of the Island. At this point, I had already given up my studio and thought I was not going to make any more work in New York. These, I do believe, are the Finale!”

Throughout her practice, Dodd unwinds and activates narratives at once biographical and metaphysical, mythical, and spiritual––transforming the exhibition into a realm of storytelling and exploration. While working primarily in large-scale canvases, the artist traverses the languages of performance and sculpture to catalogue the mnemonic remnants of the everyday through wide-ranging materials, such as flower essences of marigold, oak leaves, pine needles, foraged clay, and raw pigment. In this material sensorium, Dodd interlaces the mythological and spiritual dimensions, allowing the dynamic realm of the canvas and painterly action to extend into the gallery space. The basis of this exhibition is similarly materialist: the starting point of the series was the plant, Woad. Indigenous to the United Kingdom, the plant contains the pigment indigo and was used as a war paint by the Picts in their plights for independence. Summoning the liberatory powers of the substance, two paintings in the exhibition are titled “Woad to Freedom”––riffing on the Ode to Freedom and Road to Freedom to invoke Dodd’s own decisive turn to leave the United States and return to her place of ancestry. At the same time, these paintings interweave pigments sourced from New York soil, as oak leaves and pine needles from this literal and symbolic space sink into the canvas.

Made entirely outdoors, without a roof covering, each paintings underwent a significant ecological transformation. In ways, the process adumbrates the logic of the natural world, thinking to the way plants, animals, humans, and objects are productively reshaped by their environments––analogizing Dodd’s own reflections of the significance of the spaces she occupies. As she describes: These canvases received showers of rain and frost and I peeled them up as the sun was defrosting them, in the last possible moment they could be brought inside. I feel they capture this last moment, the end of the living season and the return to earth, introspection, safety. Once brought inside into a spare bedroom, I realized the reality and stupidity of trying to "finish" them. I had given up my studio, had no tools or pigments left. As I shaped the smaller canvases using a broom as my straight edge, I was able to laugh and surrender to the fact that this was my end. And so, the paintings have very little gesture added and remain an honest display of place, time, and setting. Soon after, I was on a plane to Scotland.”

The coda of this exhibition is what the artist calls “the Hemlock Trunk.” After a recurrent dream spanning decades centering on the image of a split trunk tree, Dodd came across its image in the physical world: a tree split right at the base and growing two trunks side by side nearby her studio Upstate. Part of a psychological and psychic narrative, this symbol of “total disconnection” from Dodd’s roots first came to her as part of a disorienting dream in the noughties in which she envisioned her body severed from the waist down and, in a search to mitigate the pain, immersed her split body in the ocean where the saltwater “flowed between the two halves like a sheet of glass.” Nearly two decades later, an elaboration on this vision transpired: “I had a vision of giant legs walking through a show of my paintings.” In the forest, while working on the paintings on view in this exhibition, she came across the legs––an encounter and realization of the unconscious and subliminal. With personal difficulty, and performing the ritual offerings prescribed to her by indigenous peoples of the land, including talking to the tree, asking its permission, and giving it three days to find a new home, Dodd cut down the tree at the least harmful time, when its energy was already returning to the Earth, down into the roots, and underground for winter. Interpreting these interconnected episodes, Dodd has concluded that the resulting tree sculpture is a prism of her own disconnection from her ancestral roots, a means of understanding the symbolism of her own dreams and her path towards reconnection and reintegration through her embodied return to Scotland and her ancestral land.

Lucy Dodd (b. 1981, New York) completed studies at Art Center College of Design, CA (2004) and Bard College, New York (2011). Selected solo shows include Open Plan: Lucy Dodd, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); Buttercut, Power Station, Dallas (2016); Guernika, Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2014) and Welcome to the White Bottom, Pro Choice, Vienna (2010). Recent group shows and performances include Scrappy Chair Challenge, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2022); Contemporary Art: Five Propositions, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2019); Reconnecting with the World: About the Poetic in Elements and Materials, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main (2018); Topologies, The Warehouse, Dallas (2018); Dreaming Mirrors | Dreaming Screens, Sprüth Magers, Berlin (2016); Venganza (I Don’t Want to be Friends), Armada, Milan (2015); Maize Mantis with Sergei Tcherepnin, The Kitchen, New York (2015); among others.

The exhibition can be viewed Thursdays through Sundays, 10 to 5pm, by scheduling an appointment through info@theranch.art. Should a visit outside of gallery hours be necessary, please email us and we will do our best to accomodate. The second part of this exhibition, The Beginning, will be presented at Sprüth Magers, Berlin.