INTERVIEWS

Alex Dodge, Artist

Review and Interview by Francisco Lacerda. 9/11/26  

 “Dream Weaver” is the name of the latest exhibition by American artist Alex Dodge, hosted at BB&M, a contemporary art gallery based in Seoul, South Korea. His works are included in a number of public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The New York Public Library. 

Based in New York and Kyoto, Dodge’s artistic practice seems to be deeply influenced by his travels to the East. What immediately captures the viewer's attention on the canvas are fabrics and threads. Dodge turns these textiles into the central focus of his works, responding to a contemporary western culture where clothing is often discarded like waste—a stark contrast to the Japanese concept of Mottainai, an expression of regret over waste. 

Dodge’s vibrant and detailed paintings feature imaginary characters wrapped in fabrics with a stockinette stitch pattern, evoking the traditional art of knitting. It seems to me that this machine-knitted wool (I Assume) aesthetic gives his forms a flexible, soft, and tactile quality. For example his work “Dreamer” (2026), has bright orange, cheerful yellow, soft pink covering a octopus or ghost-like form figure. This figure with ski-style beanie topped with a light blue pom-pom, makes it look conformably warm and cosy. This work makes me think about nostalgic warmth—reminiscent of childhood memories and handcrafted garments made by our grandmothers. 

On another hand, his work is by no means child or infantil. Take for example Big Helper (2026), this artwork has a smile of a light sage-green knitted glove resting on a flat surface. This “fragile” appearance reflects the Japanese ethos of care and reverence for objects, alongside omotenashi, which emphasizes deep consideration for surrounding spaces and emotional states through handling objects gently and protecting fragile things so they endure. These tangible forms are possibly realized through traditional handcraft methods Dodge saw during his extended residence in Japan. 

Dream Weaver resembles a memory or a dreamlike vision far more than objective reality. Much like Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931), Alex Dodge’s work presents the pliable, soft material of a memory that persists, even as it is distorted by time and space. These paintings act as a screen upon which memory is rendered, continually shaped by both external environment and internal mental frameworks (Bartlett, 1932). 

Mental representations of the world are the fundamental building blocks of human thought—symbolic structures rather than static pictures. Dreams, in turn, serve as conscious reflections of cognitive development and individual identity. This intuition is far from new: the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius (c. 99–55 BC) observed that dreams are direct reflections of our daily lives (Woods, 1974), illustrating how memory actively constructs the landscape of our unconscious mind. 

It is precisely at this intersection of memory, dream, and cognitive experience that Alex Dodge introduces the concept of the Dream Weaver, bridging physical textiles with digital systems. Utilizing advanced 3D computer simulations, Dodge translates digital bits and code into intricate painted knit patterns—exploring how code and technology subtly reshape human emotion, memory, and imagination. 

Stylistically and historically, Dodge’s practice dialogues with a long artistic tradition centered on fiber and handcraft. His work echoes classical depictions of knitters and weavers—from Jean-François Millet and William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s La Tricoteuse to Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Girl Crocheting—while simultaneously channeling the contemporary spirit of Magda Sayeg, pioneer of the yarn-bombing movement that envelops rigid public architecture in soft, tactile forms. 

Francisco Lacerda

Francisco Lacerda: How was your childhood, Alex, and how important are those early memories to the nostalgic “warmth” in your work? Do you feel your work offers a deliberate sense of comfort and coziness that is missing from our modern, screen-driven lifestyle? 

Alex Dodge: My memory of childhood is a warm one in many ways, insulated within that transitional moment between the analog past and the coming digital age. I can imagine excavating sedimentary layers of stuffed animals, crochet blankets, and vinyl LPs, then cassette tapes, giving way to early Atari and Nintendo gaming consoles, and eventually my first PC running DOS and Windows 3.1. 

It was a warm and cozy time in a very real domestic sense, growing up in the middle of the United States during the 1980s and 90s, but I think it was also a time of insulation in a broader cultural sense, at least within Western culture. We were a generation that would know the world both before and after the early internet, but we also lived within the woolly, myopic comfort of an American perspective that seemed validated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR—the so-called “end of history.” 

I think nostalgia for the past, with its consolidated notion of “simpler times,” always obscures a more complicated reality that continually resurfaces. The present is always sorting out the mess that the past swept under the carpet, as it were.

FL: On average, how long does it take for you to complete a painting from the initial 3D digital simulation to the final canvas? 

AD: The process is hard to put bounds on. I usually start with simple sketches on paper. These are quick, just testing out ideas. Building what I can only describe as “situations” within a simulated 3D space can take anywhere from a few days to a week, depending on the complexity of the models. Then there's rendering those back into a 2D image, creating stencils from that, and finally painting. Altogether, it can take about a month, sometimes longer. 

FL: Which artists and writers have had the greatest influence on your practice and visual thinking? 

AD: To name a few poets, William Blake—both his poetry and his artwork—Dylan Thomas, and Ono no Komachi. As for visual artists, there are too many to mention, but I always come back to Guston. I've also been thinking a lot about the Fayum mummy portraits lately. Among contemporary writers on culture, I really enjoy reading L. M. Sacasas' essays on Substack. 

FL: How do you view the contrast between Western consumer culture and Eastern philosophies regarding waste and care? Did you experience culture shock during your time in Japan, particularly in Kyoto, and how central has Japanese culture become to your artistic identity? 

AD: This is actually something I've been thinking quite a bit about lately. With waste, I've encountered an interesting inversion that might not be immediately apparent. 

I spent time with Japanese carpenters during a fellowship I received from the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission. While talking to the head carpenter at Ise Shrine, which is completely dismantled and rebuilt every 20 years, he explained that it's only through this process of destruction and rebuilding that the craft and skills of that particular kind of carpentry are maintained. We learn through taking things apart, he explained and that knowledge is passed on to the next generation. A more Western understanding of maintenance tends to value the artifact over the process. 

Concerning care, there's a great book called Traumatized by the cultural theorist Catherine Liu. She makes an important distinction between care as a genuine human and social responsibility and care as an ideology used to manage suffering without really addressing its causes. I think this feels accurate to our current Western, or at least American-centric, understanding of care and it’s very close to a Buddhist perspective where compassion without wisdom can lead us astray. 

Care in Japan operates a bit differently, I would say. In more collectivist societies, care is often distributed through family and community rather than delegated to specialists. Its focus is perhaps more relational, concerned with maintaining harmony through social support rather than necessarily healing. It's inherently less individualized, I think. That relational quality has deep roots, not just in the Confucian influences from China, but likely also in the more broadly animistic relationship with nature that Shinto invokes. I'm no expert, but this is the sense I've gotten during my time here. 

I wouldn't say I experienced culture shock in a way that was particularly difficult to process, but I've become increasingly aware of how much the American and Western conception of the self, and the relentless differentiation of identity it requires, can become a particular kind of burden and, at times, an obstacle to creative freedom. 

Again, I feel a bit wary of artistic identity in the age of Instagram, but being an artist who spends a lot of time in Japan has certainly influenced my work in a number of ways. 

FL: In the context of this exhibition at BB&M, what does the title Dream Weaver mean to you personally? 

AD: There are a number of myths about weaving that I remember from bedtime stories as a child, like those of Arachne and Clotho from Greek mythology. I later learned about similar figures in Japan, like Jorōgumo. 

There's an ongoing investigation of digital and network systems in my work, primarily through the use of repeating patterns on cloth. In this body of work, that investigation extends into the woven structure itself. Textiles and weaving have a direct relationship with computation. The original Jacquard looms used punched cards long before the first computers. Weaving itself is a kind of original binary system of warp and weft. 

I guess I feel that there was a gradual shift in our world that began in the 90s with the early internet, followed by something more seismic in the 2000s with the arrival of the iPhone. The physical world we knew was rapidly being replaced by a digital one. A new reality was being woven, a kind of lucid dream that no one really noticed, like a sleight-of-hand trick. 

But the weavers have become increasingly consolidated into larger and larger corporations with state-like power. Now the weavers themselves are increasingly AI-based. It was reported this year that bots now outnumber humans on the internet. 

I've long been interested in dreams, and in recent years I've been reading about some newer ideas concerning why we dream. The neuroscientist Erik Hoel has proposed a theory that borrows from machine learning to better understand how the brain might expand an “overfitted” model of reality. In other words, we dream to prepare ourselves for things that lie outside the statistical distribution of our waking experience. So in a sense this work encompasses two aspects of the dream as anthropomorphised characters; the weaver and the dreamer. The latter is situated in a position of control and rigidity within the rules of the system, then the dreamer represents a kind of freedom that can exist even within a simulation. 

BY GOOGLE ADSENSE