Shaun O’Dell has devoted the past eight years towards the dissection of mythological and ideological narratives which posit Man as all powerful, a force of and superior to nature. O’Dell observes that the American self concept is inextricably bound to the notion of this nation’s strength and superiority whether in relation to nature or fellow man. He cites as examples Manifest Destiny, Native American genocide, slavery, the rise of industrial capitalism and resource extraction, labor wars, the world wars, Hiroshima, space flight, extending to our modern day presence in the Middle East. The investigation and mapping of these histories and their protagonists, Daniel Boone to Robert Oppenheimer, have formed the basis and strict structure of O’Dell’s lexicographical image system, or drawings.
Of late, post Oppenheimer, O’Dell’s drawings have become less structured and more intuitive as appropriate to his tangential exploration of a more subjective topic, apocalypse. An extension of his investigation and mapping of Hiroshima and the proliferation of nuclear weaponry, this new abstract has opened the work to broader strokes and reading. Images of mushroom clouds are replaced by those of yellow clouds and acid rain. The tables are turning. America’s past had been the story of Man’s imperious relationship to nature, America’s future will be Nature’s response.
Shaun O’Dell’s work has been seen recently at the CCA Wattis Insitute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; in the SECA Award show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and at the Berkeley Art Museum. He is represented in San Francisco by the Jack Hanley Gallery.