Memories appear shaky and cinderous, meteoric contusions of being and becoming, volcanic rumblings of the self, perpetually oozing and calcifying. Artist Reggie Burrows Hodges imagines psychic realms knotted and stretched by the spirals of space and time—warped and wobbly terrains of the mind, interior geologies made of craggy fissures and serrated shadows where perception and reality converge, perpetually entangled in reciprocal acts of transformation. Emerging in the layers of black paint that primes the surface of each canvas, figures appear as abstract dark luminescence, as traces of twilight emanating from fields of abounding depths, mysterious psychological realms of boundless complexity akin to something cosmic or oceanic. These dark pools do not register as hollow voids but tenebrous and vibrational currents—dynamic, intersecting layers of time and space where shadows dwell within shadows, bottomless dimensions endlessly scrambling and unscrambling. 

To immerse oneself in memory requires ongoing construction and reconstruction, reckoning with fluctuating notions of self, fragmented histories, and present realities—attempting to make sense of the splintery intangible pieces of identity that may never be understood or feel whole. Hodges brings these tensions between the inner-psychic world and the outside world to the surface, dancing between figuration and abstraction to convey intimate scenes of self-reflection, sites where the psychic and spiritual are registered in lived realities and encountered in the familiar. Various reflective surfaces act as portals that seize upon moments of reflection and glimmers of self-awareness—portraits projected in a sleepy computer screen, in a compact mirror, illuminated in sliding glass doors, in the gentle lapping of water, rippling with fanciful visions of multiplicity, enticing one to dive in. Hodges depicts the experience of turning inward as a means to look also outward—a shift in perspective that illuminates the duality and friction between the interior, mental and emotional realms of existence and the exterior realities, an anxiousness rendered as a bubbling layer that pervaded Hodges work, swelling as our inner lives continue to rub up against the rigid outside forces of reality. This inside-out notion of the self and identity is inherently coded and elusive, pervading legibility as they are deeply situational, relational, and based on experience and worldview. The artist captures a spatial psyche that makes me want to tuck into myself—nestled in the innermost core of my being, where one is more sensitive and attuned to all that is not visible but profoundly felt, sensed and imagined.

Karma
7351 Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90046
On view through July 7, 2023