Robert Hodge, visual DJ
Note: This story is the first in a series featuring Houston artists in their studios.
When the pandemic shutdown began about a month ago, Robert Hodge stocked up by visiting a vinyl store.
He bought 200 albums, enough to supply him for a good stretch. Jazz, hip-hop, country — “pretty obscure stuff, a lot of people I’ve never heard of,” he says. The music didn’t really matter. He wanted jacket imagery that resonated, pictures that jam on their own.
Let’s call him a Vi-DJ — a visual DJ.
An X-acto knife in hand, Hodge slices out figures, type and symbols that he mixes and shuffles into collaged constructions, layering the pieces atop many layers of distressed, found paper and cutting “windows” of text into the middle to add depth. “I want you to see the records underneath, and the reclaimed paper,” he says.
Hodge is still on a roll with the series he started for the Contemporary Art Museum Houston’s temporarily shuttered “Slowed and Throwed” exhibition, a group show of artists who have been influenced by DJ Screw.
Hodge doesn’t usually work at a small table in a living room. That’s one reason he is keeping the new pieces smallish, about 20-by-20 inches.
Nor does he normally work beside his 8-year old daugher, Xara, and within earshot of his wife, Nikita, a tax accountant who has been busy all day every day on the phone. The shutdown caught the Hodges in transition, renting a third-floor Airbnb in the Third Ward before they move into a nearby house they are buying from his mother — his childhood home.
“It’s pretty brutal to work in here,” Hodge says, although he is impressed with Xara’s drawings and watercolors. “She's way better than I was at that age.”
At the new place, he will have a studio out back, maybe even with room enough to unload his three storage units full of materials.
Records from the jackets he has dismantled in the past few weeks have piled up around the worktable. He does listen to the music, and he takes notes for reference. Most of the time a good cover reflects the quality of what’s inside, he says. “I get surprised with some really good music.”
Still, he can’t keep all the records, so he is bundling up mixed sets as care packages for friends.
“I’m just making,” he says. “I just want to stay sane. All of this stuff was born out of depression, so it makes sense to do it during a pandemic.”
Not that he is making art about the coronavirus. “I’m interested in making things out of joy,” he says. “Art is pure escapism, and music is what ties everybody together. I want it to be positive.”