In Beryl Odette's first solo show with Track 16, she explores across a range of media her fascination with how we perceive each other. How do we learn to see – and not to see?
Beryl Odette’s work probes the process of visual apprehension through techniques of layering and accumulation. From countless layers of color obscuring or redacting figures in her paintings to the infinite crystals accumulating on her salt chandeliers, Odette explores the struggle to be seen and to see. As objects of light and opulence, chandeliers both promote the ability to see and demand to be seen. Transforming chandeliers, Odette cultivates the process of crystallization, changing the objects’ relationship with form and light. The results are so enchanting, the viewer may not be immediately aware of what becomes hidden or lost. Odette uses beauty as her favorite hammer.
Odette excavates and translates, pointing to that which is observed, but still unseen. No matter the place, time or audience, beauty soothes that which enters the eye, the way a kind voice is skilled at delivering news we don’t want to hear. With formal beauty she invites your gaze to look past, offering up feelings we are less comfortable naming.
The physicality of her haunting, vibrant, opulent canvas surfaces draw you in with their allure. However, the surface also signifies the brutality of our society’s prioritizing of specific conventions of beauty, wealth and ways of being. Odette contends with these imposed definitions by giving us a soft entrance to a dreamlike depth where one can confront the possibility of seeing and being seen, as with the painting
Above Water.
Often a symbol of whole personhood, the human head recurs throughout Odette’s practice. From figural painting to three dimensional sculpture, the head represents what she calls a “dream box” – a form that gives us space in which to imagine. The cast heads on view offer a place of possibility and also reflect our learned perceptions – what we bring to any specific head.
Where were we taught to perceive in such ways? For Odette, there is also a through line of children. How do they learn to perceive as their culture or communities ask them to? Often through games, evoked here through Odette’s
Eye On carved baseball bat and her wry
Ladder for Girls. Built on layers of experience that may not even have been their own, the accumulation of generational experiences including trauma, shape the hidden strata of perception.
Born and based in Los Angeles, Beryl Odette is descended from survivors of slavery and the Holocaust. From classical formal oil on canvas, to site-specific installations and video work, she explores multiple mediums and celebrates unusual materials (including a favorite: salt). Beryl’s work is highly reflective and meditative, as it asks the viewers to sit in our shared humanity. Her work is gently accessible while being profoundly sublime.
Odette’s most recent shows include The Bag Gallery, Oxford House Projects, The Lodge Gallery, r d f a Gallery, LSH CoLab and the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago.
Text by
Richelle Munkhoff
Beth Ann Whittaker
Plain Sight Archive
