Jason Dodge (b. 1969) is an American in Berlin—and a sculptor among poets. For over twenty years, he has been making work (assemblages, installations, objects, things) drawing on the minimalist tradition in art that simultaneously simmers and smolders with the emotional charge and riches of everyday life. A master of formal restraint and understatement, he makes sculptures—often incongruous juxtapositions of hard and soft, hidden and seen, living and dead—that brim with biography, alternately resembling literary vignettes, portraits, impressions or anecdotes.

A recent turn has seen Dodge move away (some) from the stark, ascetic language-of-less towards the promiscuous aesthetic of vintage scatter art, making literal and liberal (on occasion even painterly) use of the flotsam and jetsam of lived memory, of “refuse”—think words strewn across the blank pages of art’s various spaces.

The title of this exhibition was suggested to the artist by the Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson, who will compose a poem for its dismantling in late November. Hutchinson will also read from his work at the Poetry Foundation on November 30, and Dodge will provide the introduction.

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete