To enter the work of Donald Odita is to enter the honest mind of an artist at the crossroads. The crossroads, as it is in The Blues, that earthy though mystical place where the real world meets the aspirations of a world that could be, though it isn’t. Although thoroughly produced within a historical language of Western visual art, Odita is one of those artists who is so conscious of the “remix” and the hybrid nature of contemporary culture at the end of the millennium. Think of the ironical nature of America’s greatest musical contributions – jazz and hip-hop, or Black British jungle. It is within this context that Odita fully accepts the dual nature of artistic practice. Since 1990, when he first moved to New York, Odita has been making work that consciously examines the history of painting as a form of culture, not only as pretty picture. Adeptly allowing the viewer to move through a visually stunning frame of colour. Odita seduces the viewer into a natural state of contemplation for the meanings behind his powerful pictures. His large paintings on canvas trace the hardedge paintings from the 60s when Op-Art was more than fashionable, and considered to be evidence of a natural progression for painting. Yet, in Odita’s paintings, something is clearly off: lines that we think are repeating are actually jumping off from the opposite side of the canvas fnding their infinitesimal point on the other side of the canvas. This play on the eye and of clean-cut symmetry could be seen as a response to the cold stance of minimal paintings’ origins and its lack of content, in particular. Not content to provide merely a nice picture tom play off of the new couch, odita is as consumed by content as he is by form. In fact, these painted swaths of colour also reference traditional African art and the beauty of non-linearity as a conceptual point of reference for decoration and for its narrative possibilities. While the paintings maintain a subtlety that sometimes asks for patient consideration. Odita’s installations with wallpaper ask us to consider the nature of painting as am ass produced commodity designed to provide little visual stimulation or inquiry. Like Robert Gober’s wrapped rooms of lynching victims, Odita’s context is hidden in repetitive blocks of colour that create a second skin for the wall. Found images of icons (i.e., Muhammad Ali), and is the case here, the bizarre often-stereotypical imagery of early Hollywood film. The repeated images create an innocent monochromatic fram that belies it subject matter. As evidence of Odita’s fearlessness is experimenting, be created “Authentic African,” in 1997, which is a sort of personal statement that takes his artistic inquiries to his own body. In four digitally manipulated photographs, he posed as a soldier, a businessman, a prince and a shell-boy, conjuring the perceptions of others while simultaneously exposing the plethora of human self-identities and the inherent weakness of ethnic delineations in that regard. Donald Odita’s art lies comfortably in the interstices of duality and “twoness” as espoused by the writings of W.E.B. DuBois. Odita engages the viewer with techniques that are seemingly disparate in approach. Alas, they are not, it is a single solitary way that the artist engages us with seduction and repulsion that exposes empty signifiers and their hollow truths. Like Billie Holiday belting out Strange Fruit, Odita engages you sweetly and softly only to sock it to you upon further inspection.
Franklin Sirmans, 1998