KNOXVILLE.- The Knoxville Museum of Art presents the exhibit SubUrban: Tomory Dodge. In his spectacular paintings on canvas Los Angeles-based artist Tomory Dodge explores what he calls the "collisions between nature and culture, or fantastic sites that seem located on the very edge of society's reach." The paintings emerge from the space between narration and abstraction, creating an ambiguous place that is neither completely abstract nor representational.

Dodge demonstrates his commitment to painterly gesture and the pleasure of painting, yet he leads the viewer through that painterly exterior surface into ambiguity and multiple narrative possibilities. Human-made objects such as empty cans and litter decorate Dodge's lushly painted landscapes and nowhere-scapes, rupturing the eerie nature we encounter through the thick paint.

Dodge's colors are often dark and mysterious, prompting us to question these shaded grottoes on the edge of the real and the artificial. These scenes of seemingly abandoned spaces and inscrutable landscapes, punctuated with litter, discarded objects, and other oddities, complicate and muddle interpretation. Representation and abstraction, and artifice and nature coalesce to disrupt any effortless path between image and paint surface.

Dodge sums it up when he notes, "I feel that beyond any ideas that may be evoked by my work, in the end, I am really interested in paint. I see one of the central 'mysteries' of painting to be the ability of a drip or blob or brush stroke to become a tree or a cloud or anything else."

Tomory Dodge received his M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia and a B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. He has exhibited his work at ACME. Gallery, Los Angeles, San Francisco Art Institute, CA. and CRG Gallery, New York, NY, among others. This is his first solo museum exhibition.