James Dodd: Shed Wizard

Shed Wizard presents a range of recent outcomes from Bordertown-born James Dodd’s exploratory practice. Dodd is an artist who celebrates cultures of DIY and life hacking, a result of his upbringing in the ‘make-do’ context of an agricultural childhood. He applies radical curiosity and invention to investigations of public space, plays with the idea of fantastic tools and the backyard as an important place to make art.

A sense of adaptation and hybrid invention is especially present in his bicycle sculptures and the various iterations of The Painting Mill, an art-making machine. Having spent a large period of time immersed in Australia’s street art movement of the early noughties, his practice also borrows from graffiti for gallery outcomes, and hijacks conceptual pursuits for application at the edges of society, in suburbia or regionally.

This selection of works includes vivid paintings, unusual bicycles, strange machines and candid videos. It brings this range of objects together to examine Dodd’s trajectory over the past decade or so and examines ongoing themes including social and political resistance; adventure and risk; and the hand-made contraption as a magical art device.

James Dodd exhibits regularly across Australia in publicly funded institutions, commercial galleries and artist-run spaces. He works across a range of mediums with particular interests in painting, DIY, graffiti, adventure and public space. He maintains a curiosity in suburbia as landscape and also the creative activities and transgressions that occur in public spaces. Dodd is active as an educator at Adelaide Central School of Art and regularly delivers youth and community based arts programs across a range of outcomes.

James Dodd is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide.

IMAGE: Painting Mill, 2017, Wonderwalls Festival, Port Adelaide