NYAB Event - Odili Donald Odita “The Velocity of Change”

Odili Donald Odita “The Velocity of Change”

Jack Shainman Gallery (524 W 24th St)

[Image: Odili Donald Odita "Reveal" (2015) acrylic on canvas, 90 x 112 in. © Odili Donald Odita. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.]

This event has ended.

Jack Shainman Gallery presents The Velocity of Change, the fourth solo exhibition of new paintings by Odili Donald Odita.

“The limits of language are the limits of my world.” -Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922.

Language, as a construct communally accepted, carries with it the burden of its applied history – that being the history of ideation and meaning. We have engaged these forces to create a greater connection of community within social groupings. Inadvertently and otherwise, we have also used language to terrorize, vilify, cannibalize, ostracize, persecute, and subjugate others who are not in the same space of authority – this done by those that hold power over language, through its force of command and condemnation.

“The revolution will not be televised.” -Gil Scott-Heron, 1970

“The revolution will not only be televised; the revolution will be mobilized.”-AT&T and Direct TV advertisement, September 2015

The problem is language. It has always been my intention since the beginning to make paintings as a space that exists before language. Like the color-burst from a television screen before an image appears; or the open spark of thought before the idea; I want to conjure from a space that is free and construct-less, with the intention of possibility in mind.

I want to resist the binary; the faulty thinking that defines the experience of the Other in opposition to the “ground of whiteness.” Rather, it is to realize that whiteness is also a construct amongst all other identity constructions that exist within the world.

The resistance to color comes from those that want only structure without the immeasurability of light and space. I hope to engage the intrinsic power of color in its ability to escape the definitions of language that limit and paralyze.

It becomes increasingly important to recognize the power of inquiry and imagination as time flattens from remote information now edging closer to our fingertips, while thoughts filter through on auto-correct.

My Father told me when he was little he learned to cook with his Grandmother. Everyday, they spread flour on the counter and made a drawing in it as a ritual before cooking. This was done with respect to the process of cooking in each new day. I wish to engage my painting with this sentiment in mind in order to renew the space of intention, action and the imagination, again and again.

-Odili Donald Odita, Philadelphia, 2015

Odita was born in 1966 in Enugu, Nigeria and lives and works in Philadelphia. He received a Penny McCall Foundation Grant in 1994, a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in 2001 and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant in 2007.

Odita has exhibited extensively in the United States and Internationally, including a solo exhibition, Heaven’s Gate, at Savannah College of Art and Design (2012-2013); Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, as a part of the exhibition ARS 11 (2011); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX (2010); Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS (2009); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA (2008); and Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2007). Also in 2007, Odita’s large installation Give Me Shelter was featured prominently in the 52nd Venice Biennale exhibition Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind, curated by Robert Storr.

Odita has been commissioned to paint many large-scale wall installations, most recently in 2015 at the Nasher Museum and Downtown Durham YMCA, Durham, NC on the occasion of Nasher10, a celebration of the first ten years of the Nasher Museum. Other major commissions include Ezra Stiles College at Yale University, New Haven, CT (2015), George C. Young Federal Building and Courthouse in Orlando, FL (2013), United States Mission to the United Nations in New York (2011), and the New Orleans Museum of Art (2011). In 2012 he was commissioned by the New York Presbyterian Hospital to paint a 5,000-square-foot exterior wall. That same year he transformed the 20th Avenue subway station on the D line in Brooklyn with Kaleidoscope, where he translated his paintings into a series of stained glass windows.

Concurrently on view is Of Context and Without by Toyin Ojih Odutola at 513 West 20th Street and Winter in America, a group exhibition at The School, Kinderhook, NY. Upcoming exhibitions at the gallery include Claudette Schreuders at our 24th Street location, opening February 4th, 2016.