Reviews & Commentary
On Documenting Border Barriers
Pamela Dodds's exhibit, Documenting Border Barriers, powerfully conveys the dehumanizing coldness with which borders deny mobility to predominantly racialized people from the global south. The meticulously rendered portraits of border walls and fences from different parts of the world speak to diverse audiences about the violence assumed by sovereign power.
~ Harald Bauder, Ph.D.
Professor, Geography & Environmental Studies,
Graduate Program in Immigration & Settlement Studies,
Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson U)
... the extraordinary exhibition "Documenting Border Barriers" is on exhibit at the Nogales Museum of Art, whose author is the Canadian artist Pamela Dodds. The exhibition is available to the delight of culture lovers from April 16 until May 11. The entire community has the opportunity to admire the sensitivity of the artist who with each engraving transmits the suffering of migration.
~ Claudia Gomez Contreras, journalist & reporter, Nogales, Sonora, Mexico
(translated from the Spanish with Google Translate)
...And here another confrontation: the prints and texts represent the details of an engineering project, cold hard facts. A political solution that lacks the human dimension. These images ask us to think about what is not rendered: the individual people who are targeted by these barriers...
~ Eileen Thalenberg, producer,
Up Against the Wall, Stormy Nights Productions
"...This immersive exhibition installation and impressive detail within the work encouraged viewers to spend time with the artwork. The exhibition received very positive audience engagement, as reflected in the many written responses that were invited to be shared during the show...."
~ Rebecca Travis
Curator & Collections Manager
Open Studio Printmaking Centre
On Something I Want to Tell You - Big Paintings
"...Though her paintings repeatedly depict populations who are vulnerable because of their age, gender, or race, Dodds’ overriding concern is not necessarily ageism, sexism, or racism. She directly and forcefully address these topics, but does so in the service of a more general interest in vulnerability..."
~ Joseph Clark
Collective Arts Network Journal, Cleveland, OH
On Come Closer - Stories in Woodcut & Linocut Print
"...In this survey exhibition of her artwork in print, Pamela Dodds introduced moments of connection
(and disconnection) between individuals...
...What is staggeringly, arrestingly - and sometimes distressingly - human....was laid bare in the works across this exhibition.
Dodds generously invites her audience into her confidence by sharing something uniquely personal…while the viewers could not help but to see themselves, and all that is universal, in the stories and the moments, and the moments between..."
~ Sherri Helwig
Catalogue Introduction
Come Closer –
Stories in Woodcut and Linocut Print
"...she spends her time playing in the spaces in between...in the silences, in the secrets, in the places where language is constructed and where it disintegrates. Her...narratives are not linear, but cyclical. She has an acceptance that communicates grace....[H]er work that deals with relationships between women....reminds me of the words of the lesbian poet Adrienne Rich:
“The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”
~Carolyn Gage
The Art of Pamela Dodds
Carolyn Gage Blog
"..Printmaker Pamela Dodds employs a bold linearity...to create a world of deeply human and healing interaction...Her woodcut series - portraying bodies lovingly entwined with trees and earth while surrounded by the materials of war - is expertly under-patterned by the grain of the wood..."
R.M. Vaughan
"Things you can only see in the dark"
The Globe and Mail, Toronto
"Pamela Dodds, known largely as a painter of pastel-bright but quietly dignified works, departs from the familiar with dark woodcuts exploring loss and anguish. At William Busta Gallery."
Cleveland Scene, 2011
"In her recent woodcuts, Pamela Dodds utilizes symmetry and the mirror image as a conceptual and aesthetic approach. Her figures are twinned, back-to-back or face-to-face in rhythmic cycles of intimacy and distance.
Dodds exploits the grain of her woodblocks as an important collaborator... Having carefully selected...each plank of wood so that it featured a particularly symmetrical pattern, from the inception, these works emphasize the idea of the mirror both aesthetically and conceptually."
Lauren Nurse
Nick Novak Fellowship Brochure Essay
Open Studio Printmaking Centre, Toronto
"Pamela Dodds’s woodcuts, collectively titled Memory’s Witness, speak to a more ancient form of printmaking…The wood grain [is incorporated] within images of war that are at once raw and haunting."
Valaura Vedan
Okanagan Print Triennial 2012
KelownaNow.com
“[In] her large, bright canvases...there is some very serious content being explored ....Dodds goes right to the heart of emotional matters which are her real content ...[In the painting ‘Dressing,’] we seem to be privy to an intimate, private moment between two people....Formalism weds with story-telling intent to striking effect.”
Shawn Hill
Bay Windows, Boston/New England
“Pamela Dodds’ paintings depict critical emotional moments in the lives of their subjects...Men, women and children seem tuned to inner thoughts...”
Christine Temin, ‘Critic’s Tip’
The Boston Globe
“Pamela Dodds investigates psychologically charged moments in human dramas fraught with ambiguity.”
Joanne Silver
The Boston Herald
"Dodds' small, four-part pastel and charcoal series of a woman awakened...immediately and realistically evokes themes of fear and solitude"
Amy Finch
Boston Phoenix
“The effect is at once powerful and familiar.”
Michael Mayo
South End News, Boston