Dustin Hodges at 15 Orient in New York City: An Ensnaring Exhibition at an Exciting Gallery

Dustin Hodges’ paintings in a new exhibition at 15 Orient in New York feel like a dream, but it’s somebody else’s dream.

There’s a distinct, permeating sense you’re out of place yet still thoroughly enmeshed within the scenery, which feels consumptive — though only some of it is even representational. Hodges places recreations of characters from the familiar, animated movie “Dumbo,” mostly the crows, in perplexing, fading environments of loose indications of actual structures and tempests of growing, hanging color.

The abstract areas of color bear an internal weight similar to the more realistic, environmental indications of a place and habitation… and if you contemplate the painted scenery long enough, those abstractions surpass the actually materializing surroundings in their reach and impact. We might assume that, visually and relationally, something like the sensed, material structure of a house or building — something concrete and specific, grounded and delineated in place — would rule the spatial equation. But, they don’t. The more specific visuals fade. In the world of this art, we’re all under the long arm of something present — and very obviously present — but unseen, or at least outside our cognizable, visual perceptions.

The blending permutations of color threaten to disappear while you’re looking at them, but they don’t. Instead, they’re a flash, or something — some place — that became a flash… fleeting, but sparking their situations. Amid the art, it’s as though something is looking back at you with the implicit authority or far-reaching stature of a being maybe ruling the situation; but you’re left with no idea what or who or where they actually are.

The places imagined and explored within this art in Hodges’ show are transmuted into their sometimes confusing, foreboding, and encompassing potentials: their non-spatial reach.

The imagined, anticipated, or simply envisioned becomes in these artworks that which you are seeing the most at all, considering the fictional origin of the only actual characters that appear in any of the exhibition’s art. There’s a tidal wave of existential, situational disconnect that reaches through these paintings, which are spatially like landscapes while largely refusing the specificity that a painted or otherwise aesthetically created landscape would normally come with. Something was turned off. But you’re still where it used to be.

Whether in fine art or visual observations of the world around us, I think we often carry the assumption of an external, visually reliable, and essentially unmoving scene with some kind of internally linking structure, even if it’s a loose one. That’s not here. There’s something monumental in then stepping into the mists that move in amid that internally circulating structure’s absence.

The creation of place, and the creation of… anything becomes a step-by-step process, one caught in a state of indefinite flux. In the spatially expanding world of Hodges’ paintings, the materializing existence of anything you’re looking at becomes a mysterious loop, something processional much more than it’s ever going to be anything fixed in place or form. Hodges expands that notion of process above form, place, and even recognition to a captivating extreme, drawing in everything that you’re looking at.

Even the “Dumbo” crows become harbingers whose arrival is not signaled but whose emotional, expressive states — and even the extent to which their forms are finalized — change across the canvases. The enigma created by forms only partly completed is entrancing. The artistic mystery is dancing.

Hodges’ paintings are awash in spatial confusion so overpowering that it looks like the environments themselves are succumbing right in front of you, and the intensity of it — the intermingling and spinning outwards of it all — makes you feel for these places and the people and beings within them… as much as they’re very clearly not a specific, stationary physical place and instead something more like a drift. Any physical place morphs into a carried presence, something that the place itself is tasked with putting forward as much as that task and the feeling of it carry over to those in its presence.

The pointed, direct placement of the figures and bits of more specifically invoked place that do appear mean you find yourself clinging to those reflections of something more individual. A character, whether these from “Dumbo” or somebody or something else, becomes a guiding light, of sorts, a gathering place, something to return to time and time again, incarnated anew, freshly, though still on a continuum with what came before.

The experience of moving through and existing with some particular place or series of places becomes less about the logistical specifics of that place and more about the overall sense of it, about something that feels inherent but alien from it. It’s the characters who step outside of their original moments, existing in correlation with the fogging, fading areas of… something… who bring it all together.

I’m going to keep clinging to these characters, even as their relentless individuality is washed over and through by mystery, an alienation that doesn’t necessarily end with a complete separation from the original, or just earlier, but simply develops each place and those within it.

Dustin Hodges’ truly enriching exhibition at 15 Orient, which is called “Barley Patch,” continues through April 26. Thank you to the gallery for helping set this up.

Featured image: Dustin Hodges, “Barley Patch,” 2025. Installation view, 15 Orient. Courtesy 15 Orient and the artist. Photography by Sebastian Bach.