For his fourth show with the gallery, Shaun O’Dell continues to work through his process creating painted collages which patently resist stasis. Pushing this kinetic body of work to its limits the artist uncovers unique spaces and scenes within the two-dimensional picture plane. This show will present a new group of paintings, all paper on canvas on panel.
O’Dell’s work has long dealt with mythology both literally and on a broad scope. His work is an allegory of painting seen through the lens of abstraction. Whether dealing with named characters or specific incidents in a personal or collective memory, these canvases are riddled with formal clues and innuendo. The patchwork palettes not only map a historical investigation of different psychological states for O’Dell, they also map a history of the studio. Employing ends to their means this group of paintings can be seen as a larger entropic composition, a place where order and chaos are overlapping simultaneously. They are networked from an archive of the artist’s own compositional strategies, such that not only is mythology employed as a topical issue, but also as a personal mythos.
The optics of accretion witnessed in the bright and busy paintings call to mind the improvisational nature of "experimental music," which O’Dell has long been engaged. This parallel, process-based practice involves a high level of chance, but also a rigorous engagement and recursive protocol. Both "experimental music” and art-making, in the case of O’Dell, are a confrontation with the work itself, a participatory experience for maker and viewer alike that can be seen in the generative results. Ultimately these practices are a means of composing abstract compositions both in sound and space, while embodying the experience of abstraction and alienation.
SHAUN O’DELL was born in 1968 in Beeville, Texas. He is a graduate of Stanford University’s MFA Program and has exhibited both nationally and internationally appearing recently at Inman Gallery, Houston; Jack Hanley, New York; dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel; The A Foundation, Liverpool; Berkley Art Museum, Berkley; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco and San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco. His work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the de Young Museum.
The Gallery will publish a catalogue with an original essay by Jordan Stein.