Shaun O'Dell : Doubled

We are excited to welcome back artist Shaun O’Dell for his second solo exhibition at Gallery 16, on view May 21st to July 10th. Opening reception will be held Thursday, May 21st from 6pm-9pm. 

Doubled will be an exhibition of recent mixed media paintings, sculpture, video and a pair of wall drawings by Emily Prince.

In Doubled, O’Dell started with an old portico in Golden Gate Park called The Portals of the Past. His interest in the site comes from its reference in Hitchcock’s Vertigo and his own experience of it on daily bike rides. In both the film and San Francisco folklore the Portals of the Past are associated with the supernatural and a disruption in our understanding of the physical world. O’Dell uses the Portals as a catalyst to make an associative journey through autobiographical, historical and fictional narratives that contribute to an impossible mapping of his position in space and time.

Recently, O’Dell has been influenced by Franco Berardi’s book, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. In the book Berardi describes the conjunctive and the connective modes of thinking. The conjunctive is an associative kind of thinking. The connective is a reduction of everything to straight lines and points (digitization comes to mind) everything becomes standardized. O’Dell’s recent work is a reaction to connective thinking becoming the dominant way in which society operates.

Shaun O'Dell was born in 1968 in Beeville, Texas. He is a graduate of Stanford University’s MFA Program and has exhibited both nationally and internationally appearing recently at Susan Inglett Gallery, New York; Inman Gallery, Houston; Jack Hanley, New York; dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel; The A Foundation, Liverpool; Berkley Art Museum, Berkley; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco and San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco. His work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the de Young Museum.