ODETTE ENGLAND – EXCAVATIONS
2016-10-24Home is the center-weight of Odette England’s artistic practice, with memory and forgetting being the counterbalances. Her photographs are fragile, contemplative and temporal spaces. Throughout her practice, she works with expired film, vintage cameras, damaged negatives and alternative photo processes; exploring volatility of identity, emphasizing the unstable nature of the past/present and the parent/child seesaw. These overall themes continue to be examined with Excavations, which utilizes historical photographs from the artist’s family archive. The 18 color photographs presented in the exhibition, are one-of-a-kind and unique, having undergone a meticulous and labor-intensive process of being partially erased and obscured.
This process of manual manipulation, is evidenced by the trace of the artist’s hand—gestures in the form of lines, sweeping
arches and circular movements, through to dense areas of almost total obliteration of the original image. Across the
artworks, this stripping away of visual information is carefully balanced with glimpses of substantive visual clues—a sitting
figure, a landscape vista, a tree or lamp-post.
Opposite – Excavation No. 6, 2015
Exhibition runs through to November 19th, 2016
Klompching Gallery
111 Front St, Suite 206
Brooklyn
New York
NY 11201
