Earthquake Weather

Dodgson draws unexpected continuities out of years of accumulated looking, in a register that moves between the deadpan, the fragile and the quietly profound.

Earthquake Weather is the first monograph to draw on Californian artist Colin Dodgson's darkroom practice as a living source, across continuities that surface through drawing deep, sunburned beauty out of the flow of the everyday. Dodgson's eye carries the dual inheritance of two formative disciplines: a surfer's responsiveness to shifting conditions, and a darkroom photographer's exacting precision, the two held together in constant tension against a sense of wonder, bafflement and introspection before the material of the actual.

Earthquake Weather dances along the faultlines between typology and sprawl: thumbed, dog-eared book pages worn soft by use, contemporary memento mori that turn to the material of the body and its fragility, and plastic water bottles left on Japanese roadsides all serve as allegories for the fragility of our existence. Against these lines, the sequence snaps without warning into gallows humour and back again, moving through the registers of an uncertain age: fentanyl bottles lined neatly in a row, atmospheric CO2 readings, the fringes of Dodgson's established commercial practice, and excerpts from his frequent collaborations with the World Land Trust across areas of ecological importance.

Through fugues of images reacting across the page, Earthquake Weather poses a quiet challenge to the seduction of Dodgson's precise gaze, insisting on describing a world that both hides and reveals itself within the same blink of an eye. In syrupy, coastal tones, Earthquake Weather speaks to the way we accumulate: in knowledge, within our bodies, through consumption, against entropy.