Playing Dub Records at Fima Post

Hodges delves into storytelling and visual metaphor through his paintings, which grapple with themes of identity, community, truth, and memory. Starting from a black ground, he develops the scene around his figures with painterly, foggy brushwork, examining how perception is altered when the descriptive focus is placed not on human agents but on their surroundings. His art subtly references his past, drawing from his experiences growing up in Compton as well as his years as an athlete, touring musician, and recording studio owner.

This image pays homage to Hodges’s twenty-year tenure as a vocalist and bassist with a reggae dub band. In a 2020 interview, Hodges drew a direct link between his paintings and the sensation of sound, comparing his negotiation of “how to capture space within the picture plane . . . to how space feels within dub music . . . dub being this form of basically distilling down a larger composition to create this over-enhancement of space.”

Hodges’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at, among others, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2023); Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts (2023), Karma, Los Angeles (2023) and New York (2021), and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland (2021–22). His work is held in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Dallas Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.