“Art is a primordial concept, exalted as the godhead, inexplicable as life, indefinable and without purpose. The work of art comes into being through artistic evaluation of its elements. I know only how I make it, know only my medium, of which I partake, to what end I know not.”
-Kurt Schwitters from Merz, 1921

Dodi Wexler’s obsessively hand-made constructions salute in part the great Modernists of yore, the trail-blazers who developed collage and assemblage as distinct and viable art forms, ones considered a bit renegade even today.

Enter into that evocative history of flotsam-jetsam bits of pasted papers and found tram tickets, the ‘70’s beacons of Robert Smithson and Eva Hesse. Add to that, layers of feminist genealogies ranging from the quirky paintings of Florine Stettheimer to the earthy sculptures of Ana Mendieta, and you begin to get a rough sketch of Wexler’s eclectic pantheon of influences.

Striving for familiar sources to explain or categorize someone else’s art can be entertaining at best but almost always falls short of providing any conclusive meaning. But the sketch gets a bit more refined upon learning of Wexler’s encyclopedic thirst for sourcing and recycling exotic materials (a particular kind of Japanese handmade paper that she describes as being “light as a feather but strong as an ox”, for example) as part of her cut, stained, pasted, burned and stitched panoply of inventive surfaces.

Most or all of the above is firmly tethered to Wexler’s own family history, culled in part from an amazing archive of black and white photographs and postage stamps collected from her grandmother’s extensive art travels as a young woman in the Roaring ‘20’s. These elements run through and form the artist’s atlas of images which are subsequently repatriated in works such as I Chose This: One Roman Landscape from 2004. It resembles a fantastic necklace of landscape elements, inspired by Wexler’s stint at the American Academy in Rome and her 180-degree view of the Eternal City from her studio window. As the artist says, “I began with the trees below me, but somehow, I couldn’t get any further. It was impossible to capture the rest…It is hard to make art in Rome.” Nevertheless, the city is there, buried deep in the gloriously sculpted threads of Wexler’s alchemy.

Judd Tully, critic
New York City 2004