San Francisco-based artist
Shaun O’Dell employs a tightly honed drawing style that
melds the charm of nineteenth-century folk art with the linear precision
of contemporary
blueprints. He serves up a host of American history references in large-scale
inkand-gouache drawings that read like old-fashioned schoolboy primers
conceived
through CAD. Modeled portraits of pilgrims and frontiersman float above
quirky
schematic drawings of bridges, oil derricks, and irrigation systems,while
mastodons, falcons,
and whales hunker on the sidelines. Calling into question America’s
legacy of
conquest, O’Dell traces a clear-cut path leading back to times
no less culpable than
our own in their exploitation of natural resources in the name of human
progress.
Shaun O'Dell
Born 1968
Beeville, Texas. Lives in San Francisco, California.
O'Dell
has had recent solo exhibitions at Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco
(2004) and New Image Arts in Los Angles (2001). Selected group exhibitions
include Majority Whip at White Box in
New York (2004); Storyline at New Langton Arts in San Francisco
(2004); New Acquisitions Show at San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art (2003); and International Paper at UCLA Hammer
Museum in Los Angeles (2003).
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