Inman Gallery has expanded; it's huge now, and all the more difficult for an artist to fill the space up. Shaun O'Dell has lots of drawings, which could have been spread out to fill the whole space. But he departed from showing just his drawings and used the new gallery imaginatively.
Shaun O'Dell, installation view with Feeling Easy Feelings and Silver Wall, 2011
Feeling Easy Feelings is a sculpture where two rocks (one limestone, one marble) are supporting two long brass pipes, which droop on either side of the rocks like a limp mustache. It was so wide, folks had to squeeze between the ends of the brass tubes and the walls. And then on the wall behind it was Silver Wall.
Shaun O'Dell, Silver Wall (detail), aluminum leaf, silver leaf, 2011
This wall becomes kind of a gaudy, sideways Barnett Newman, vibrating between the sublime and the mystical on one hand and the ridiculous and glam on the other. There is even a silver-on-silver "zip" running horizontally across the middle. Like Newman, O'Dell didn't worry too much about getting it perfect. If you look at the edges, you see that they weren't masked.
Shaun O'Dell, Silver Wall (detail), aluminum leaf, silver leaf, 2011
It's not meant to be perfect. The same could be said about the drawings in the show. O'Dell does abstract drawings in gouache and apparently cuts them up and collages them back onto paper. O'Dell has been studying jazz saxophone for a decade, and I see these as improvisations. The drawing before he cut it up was the theme.You could say that the theme on which a jazz musician improvises is "perfect." The improvisation screws it up--but ideally in an illuminating way, a way that reconfigures our whole conception of the theme. (Listen to "Our Favorite Things" by Julie Andrews then the version by John Coltrane, for example.) Here, though, we don't know what the "theme" was. We only see the reconfigured improvisation on it.
Shaun O'Dell, 2nd .Feelings. #5, gouache and ink on collaged paper, 2011
The pieces have a rhythmic feel to them with their groupings of parallel shapes, alternating light and dark. If you know that there's a relationship to jazz, the rhythms will be read that way. They also remind me of Constructivist paintings and some Bauhaus works.
Shaun O'Dell, 2nd .Feelings. #29, gouche on collaged paper, 2011
Almost all of the work here is likely to remind a viewer of earlier modernist work. Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on whether you think modernism is an unfinished project, as Jurgen Habermas proposed, or a dead remnant of history. Personally, I agree with Charles Jencks, who, writing about architecture, said that post-modernism meant that the entire history of of art was ours to play with, from the neolithic to the modern. So a silvery sideways Barnett Newman is perfectly allowable, as is a simplified grey Mark Rothko.
Shaun O'Dell, 2nd .Feelings. #14, gouche on collaged paper, 2011
If you look at O'Dell's website and some of his earlier work, you see that these variations (improvisations?) on modernism are not typical. This seems to be a newish thing for him. But we don't expect artists to do the same thing over and over again anymore. O'Dell's mind and visual imagination are restless and range widely--this is obvious enough by the range of work in this show. What matters is that this exhibit is full of interesting work.
Well, your photos of the exhibition intrigue me. I'll take myself over to the gallery and check it all out.
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