Jenny Odell
Biography
Jenny Odell is a Bay Area native, studied English at Berkeley and design at The New School and the San Francisco Art Institute. Odell has been featured at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Google Headquarters, and Les Rencontres D’Arles in France. As well as, KQED’s Gallery Crawl, the NPR Picture Show, Pop-up Magazine, Rhizome, Gizmodo, Design Sponge, and ESPN Magazine. Abroad, her work has been featured in Die Zeit, NEON Magazine, Le Soir, and Elephant Magazine.
Statement
In all of my prints, I collect things that I’ve cut out from Google Satellite View-- parking lots, silos, landflls, waste ponds. The view from a satellite is not a human one, nor is it one we were ever really meant to see. But it is precisely from this inhuman point of view that we are able to read our own humanity, in all of its tiny, reliably repetitive marks upon the face of the earth. From this view, the lines that make up basketball courts and the scattered blue rectangles of swimming pools become like hieroglyphs that read: people were here.
At the same time, like any photograph, satellite imagery is also immediately an image of the past. That is, to look at satellite imagery is to look not only down upon ourselves but back in time, even if only by a matter of hours or days. In recording the moment at which things as bizarre as water parks and racetracks covered the earth, the photograph also implies that moment’s own passing, encoding each tiny structure with vulnerability and pre-emptive nostagia. My desire to collect these pieces stems not only from the fascination of any collector but from a wish to save these low-resolution, sporadically-updated pixels--these strange pictures of ourselves--from time and the ephemerality of the internet.
Curriculum Vitae:
2012
• Signs of Life, solo exhibition, enter:gallery, New York, NY, February 9, 2012
• Aint Bad Issue 3 Release, Little Beasts Gallery, Savannah, GA, February 9, 2012
• TheGlint, San Francisco, CA, January 21, 2012
• Meridian, Wire & Nail, San Francisco, CA May 19, 2012
2011
• Google Headquarters, Mountain View, CA, June 27, 2011
• Here Be Dragons: Mapping Information and Imagination, Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco, CA, October 21, 2011
• One if by Wanderlust Conveyor Arts, Hoboken, NJ, November 16, 2011
• From Here On, Les Recontres d’Arles, Atelier Mécanique, Arles, France, July 4, 2011
• Out of Context, Gallery 454, San Francisco, CA , June 21, 2011
• Based on a True Story Conveyor Arts, Hoboken, NJ
• Skirball Center, New York City, May 13, 2011
2010
• Golden State, VASF Gallery, San Francisco, CA, August 7–September 24, 2010
• A Room Without a View, mauve gallery, Berkeley, CA, August 16, 2010
• Sideshow Happening, Root Division, August 14, 2010, San Francisco, CA
• Taste!, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Thursdays July 6, 2010, San Francisco, CA
• San Francisco Art Institute MFA Exhibition, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, CA, May 15, 2010
• Fiction to Inhabit, Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco, CA, November 11, 2010
Talks
• “Against Newness”, Queen’s Nails Projects, Tuesday Talks series, August 2011
• [untitled /artist’s talk], IDEO, October 2011
• “Virtual Americana”, San Francisco Art Insititute, Alternative Lecture Series, May 2011
• “The World (As Seen by Google):, The Spatio-Temporal Eccentricities of Google Street View”, San Francisco Art Institute, Alternative Lecture Series, October 2009
