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ODETTA Gallery In the press
Social Media Mentions: ODETTA

2019

Blue Bird of Happiness

"United by a shared transpersonal perspective that reaches beyond the individual ego, the artists of ODETTA's current show "Bluebird of Happiness” employ the self as an instrument for making art, rather than as the subject of the work.

Refreshingly unmired in the daily temporal slog, curator Ellen Hackl Fagan has selected paintings that invite a renewed consideration of that which is instead eternal and unchanging—the laws of nature—and their concomitant physical and metaphysical dimensions."
_ Julie Nelson

"While grounded in science, Daniel Hill's lyrical visual stenography offers a deep dive into resonances that reach beyond the five senses, and edge toward a more metaphysical realm along the lines of mystic-mathematician pythagoras’ theory of “the music of the spheres” 

The crisply defined, symmetrical lines expand outward in concentric ripples, forming graceful cascades of interweaving, emanating waves (of sound? of fluid? of light?)  One must spend some time staring into the paintings to begin viscerally *feeling* the pulses, rather than merely “looking at” them. There is an “op art” component to these paintings, as the crisscrossed sinuous lines can induce a slight sense of motion and warping of space. 

If we allow the work to take us into its world, maybe we can almost hear the the pulse of whatever source may be producing these emanations—if not audibly, then perhaps by engaging faculties of higher perception."  _ Julie Nelson

 

"Paula Overbay’s diffuse collectives of white dots twist, pull and spin in deep ultramarine blue spaces, in a joyfully unpredictable dance of self-organizing affinities. Overbay uses the visible language of painting to hint at the invisible forces that push and pull matter + energy into higher order structures around unseen centers of gravity or axes of force.

Patterns of tiny atom-like dots evoke hundreds of organic associations—the motion of clouds coalescing, wind currents swirling, or flying starlings caught mid-murmuration. Each sector of dots has its own sub-action within the overall composition; adjoining areas are asymmetrical and not bound by what their neighbors are doing—that’s what makes these pieces so delightful to peruse.

A scene from the 1999 film "american beauty" comes to mind, in which a plastic grocery bag is swept up by wind and made to dance, as if directed by an unseen choreographer—you see the results, but the immaterial impetus remains elusive. " _ Julie Nelson

"Andra Samelson maps the cosmos in a diagrammatic, rather than illustrative, manner that uses abstract symbolism to intimate spiritual truths. Along the lines of aboriginal art, her paintings reflect and embody glimmering clues about deeper levels of reality, both physical and metaphysical.

Works by Samelson in this show seem to encode one of the most fundamental dynamics at play in the universe—the paradoxical [duality+unity] of opposites.

In basic perceptual experiences such as [up/down] + [left/right] + [dark/light], each half of a pair depends upon its opposite for its own definition. A good case in point is this snippet from the buddhist heart sutra—'form is emptiness, and emptiness is form,' each is intimately and inextricably beholden to its opposite, and Samelson's work is a sort of Taoist acknowledgment of their embedded and fruitful collusion. 

Because differences cause friction and conflict, the cycle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis enacts itself endlessly. Samelson’s black, white, and royal blue compositions are woven together in a grid of opposites, vertical and horizontal, as a fabric is constructed by binding warp with weft. Black, empty circles ringed with white dots punctuate the blue squares, reading both literally as black holes out in the star-filled void of space, and poetically as wormholes into which the mind might dive on the quest for expanded consciousness."  _ Julie Nelson

"Angie Drakopoulos’ work lives in the paradoxical and mysterious nexus between the material and the metaphysical worlds. How does order arise out of chaos? How does matter assume the particular structures it does? How do we engage the mind/body problem, make sense of how consciousness and matter interrelate? And what the hell are dark matter and dark energy?

These profound questions hover over the works, whose centralized, bilaterally symmetrical, ethereal compositions of tiny white dots trace out organic structures along a vertical axis, manifested like delicately weightless strands of lace. The central 'spine' form calls to mind a human body, a column of aligned chakras, subtle energy centers through which universal energy flows.

Drakopoulos shines in evoking the innermost workings of the holistic cosmos, without remotely collapsing its mystery. By forming (or dissolving?) structure before our eyes out of an ambient, cool blue void, she points to a richly textured nothingness that is also—paradoxically—a weighted somethingness."
_ Julie Nelson

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