Suggesting both the afternoon desert sunlight just before it fades into dusk and the night black sky that makes Joshua Tree National Park such a stellar stargazing site, these images are as fragile and tough as the Joshua tree itself. 

In “Embracing the Incarnate,” Dani Dodge’s artwork from her artist-in-residency period at Mojave National Preserve—a time extended both for personal family reasons, and the pandemic—is a long-form poem both sorrowful and triumphant, yet firmly rooted in the earth from which Joshua trees grow. The luminous mixed-media works reveal the resilience of the Joshua trees, their preciousness, and the need for their preservation. Stretching between 2018 and 2021, the works record the strength and longevity of the trees, the devastation that overcame them from the 2020 Dome Fire, and the hope rising from the recovery and restoration ongoing at the park. 

Dani Dodge, Two thousand twenty-one_2, 2021. Courtesy Black Rock Art Gallery.

The artist has called the trees “souls… Gods… nature incarnate,” and she expresses both her awe for them and an identification with their survival struggle. Beginning with her own photographs, and from a great trove of images, she selected those that best represented each period in the life of the majestic trees, and her own. The exhibited works are layered, giving them a shining, yet translucent depth, as if viewed through a camera lens, or through a clear prism of water. In a glowing golden sky punctuated by shadowed trees; the image of a young woman clad in a golden dress is seen running among them, hair flying. Figures populate additional pieces; in Two-Thousand-Eighteen_3, a nude woman bends like a flower in a dance.

In 2019, when the artist was experiencing personal loss, there was a sense of quiet but sorrowful acceptance and perseverance in images like Two-Thousand-Nineteen_2, where gold and white clouds float ephemerally across a wide desert sky, the Joshua trees small but bold silhouettes along a ridge beneath it. In Two-Thousand-Nineteen_1 the sun, a paler gold circle slowly sinks down a golden sky, disappearing into the black hills below; trees stand sentinel, watching the coming dark. Images from 2020 are immersed in that same darkness; fallen trees, ashy ground, and fallen or bent trees appear to be weeping in Two-Thousand-Twenty_4. But in 2021, the work again grows more hopeful, as with the gilded trees beginning new growth in Two-Thousand-Twenty-One_1. Hanging from the ceiling of the exhibition space are several translucent pieces of clear plastic, painted with images of young golden plants, aching with hope. Each work here is infused with a sense of wonder and light, an all-encompassing light, ever more powerful for its ability to conquer darkness, glowing through it all.