EVENTS- RECENT Exhibitions

September 11- November 1, 2015
Opening Reception: Friday Sept 11, 6-8 pm
Artists Talk, Friday October 30, 7 pm
*Special guest Richard Klein, Director of Exhibitions, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum will speak on behalf of Jane Harris.
Warm up 5:30: MEOW with Steven Charles, machine made music/Electronica. Synthesizer, machines, noise 5:30-6:30 pm
Steven Charles is an artist featured at ODETTA in the curated Flat Files for Seeing Sound. Steven has performed at ODETTA before, as Computer Star, and as himself. Stop in and loosen up, listening to his sonic environment.

Viewing a great work of art is often sensate. One no longer needs to differentiate between disciplines, media, or intention. The work resonates, inside us and out -- and we enter an imagining space.

Through repetition and innovative practices, the three artists’ abstract works in Seeing Sound create poetic and visceral expressions transforming paper into experience.

Jane Harris

Jane Harris’ rigorous drawings combine a satisfying game of variations on eliptical forms, B pencils, a toothsome cold-pressed heavy watercolor paper and architectural templates. By utilizing the surface properties of the paper, she focuses our attention to the physicality of the drawing and its illusory and optical qualities simultaneously. Her approach is calculated and exacting, but by the detailed adjustments made to the proportions, the edging and the relative positioning of the shapes, an unexpected individuality, visual rhythm and sensual playfulness to each drawing occurs.

Born in Dorset, England, her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC, Hales Gallery in London and Galerie Hollenbach in Stuttgart, Germany.  In addition, she has participated in numerous group exhibitions throughout Europe, most notably at the Royal Academy of Arts in London repeatedly. The drawings selected for Seeing Sound were recently completed during the summer residency at the Josef and Anni’s Albers Foundation Residency, in Bethany, Connecticut. This is Jane’s second residency awarded there.
Jane now lives in the south of France where she resides with her husband, fellow artist Jiri Kratochvil.

Alex Paik

Alex Paik’s first serious introduction to art was through classical music as a violinist playing in various community orchestras during high school. That experience stayed with him as he made the transition to the visual arts later in college. The ethereal abstraction of music and the way that music can be simultaneously cerebral and personal, especially in the contrapuntal music of Bach has motivated Paik’s visual imagery.

These paper constructions mimic the way that the voices of a fugue are continuously repeated, transposed, inverted, and folded onto themselves. Each piece focuses on one unit as its subject , which is then repeated in different configurations as the piece grows. Alex uses repetition not so much as a compositional device, but more as a way to explore and maximize the possibilities of the unit.

Alex Paik was born in Oxnard, California and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. His work has been exhibited recently at Schema Projects, Drawing Rooms, SPACE Pittsburgh, Storefront Ten Eyck, Nancy Margolis Gallery, and Parallel Art Space. Recent solo shows include Paper Constructs at Guest Spot @ The Reinstitute, and Recapitulation Bop at Gallery Joe. Paik’s work has been in several art fairs, including Drawing Now: Paris, Amsterdam, Pulse:New York and Miami, artMRKT San Francisco, and Texas Contemporary. He is currently represented by Gallery Joe in Philadelphia and is the director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a network of artist-run spaces with locations in Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles.

Gelah Penn

For some time, the two primary aspects of Gelah Penn’s studio practice—installation and drawing—were largely independent of each other. In the last few years, she has been bringing them closer together, both conceptually and materially.
In the Polyglot Y series of drawings, she folds, smudges and punctures planes that project into space. There are concentrated regions of visual noise in counterpoint with each other and the expanses of relative quiet in which they reside. Penn also incorporates digital images of installation details to further hybridize the installations and drawings.
Her drawings spring from a love of film, and particularly film noir, wherein the underlying abstract narrative is one of psychological dis-ease. For Penn, drawing is inquiry, so drawing in space seems an especially rich locus in which to pose a multitude of questions.  

Gelah Penn’s work has been exhibited widely, most recently at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, Foley Gallery, National Academy Museum, Jason McCoy Gallery, Smack Mellon (New York, NY); Carl Berg Projects (Los Angeles, CA); Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC); Brattleboro Museum (Brattleboro, VT); Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT); Vox Populi (Phildelphia, PA); and Bibliothèque Municipale Louis Nucéra (Nice, France).

Her work is in the collections of the Columbus Museum (Columbus, GA), Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC), Brooklyn Museum Library (Brooklyn, NY) and Cleveland Institute of Art/Gund Library (Cleveland, OH), and has been reviewed in numerous publications, including Art in America, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail and a feature in Sculpture Magazine.

Penn has received fellowships from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Curatorial projects include the recent exhibition object’hood, co-curated with Inna Babaeva, at Lesley Heller Workspace, and the upcoming exhibition Diphthong, co-curated with Stephen Maine, at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center in September 2015 in NYC.

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