Found Object

Jo Confino

Diane Englander

Deanna Lee

Jane Sangerman

Sylvia Schwartz

The best found objects hold within them the thrill of discovery and instill wonder at their quirky beauty. Glimmering in a ditch or nearly obliterated on pounded pavement, these artists keep their cast-offs, raise them up and present them, for all to see, what they would call beautiful.

Through the dynamics of opposites: low, unwanted to exalted, transformed, artists Jo Confino, Diane Englander, Deanna Lee, Jane Sangerman, and Sylvia Schwartz see, a little more carefully, what shimmers and shines in world all around us, freely given.

Jo Confino

Jo Confino invites people to see with fresh eyes and to feel more connected to themselves and the world around them. Living in New York, which often values glamour and instant gratification above all else, Confino notices objects that at first sight seem insignificant and worthless. By giving them attention and a monumental quality perhaps they will finally be loved.

These photos are autobiographical in nature because they represent the artist’s own transformation as he matures into a person who knows his worth.

As a journalist for the past 35 years, he is always searching for a deeper truth. His fascination with reflections in water, glass and other materials, offers a visual expression of this desire to look beyond the habitual way we perceive reality.

While he has been taking photographs for many years, it is only since his arrival in New York three years ago that he has started exhibiting his work.

He is currently executive editor, Impact & Innovation and Editorial Director of What’s Working, at the HuffPost.

He develops long-term editorial projects that are based on social, environmental and economic justice and is a member of the senior leadership team.

Previously he was an executive editor of the Guardian and chairman and editorial director of the Guardian Sustainable Business website. During his 23 years at the Guardian, he set up and managed a unique multi-stakeholder development project in the Ugandan village of Katine, and helped create the Guardian’s environment and global development website.

He has completed an MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice at the University of Bath and is also a qualified executive coach and a trained facilitator. Jo chairs and facilitates major conferences around the world as well as more intimate workshops and events.

Deanna Lee

For the exhibition at Odetta, Lee will create several site-specific drawing installations developed from features and colors of the gallery. She will also create small installations in the flat files, using drawings made from her rubbings of walls in a house on Governors Island.

Deanna Lee’s work—in the form of paintings, drawings, site-specific installations, and public artworks—stems from patterns and traces of growth and transformation in the natural world and the built environment. Her works often feature masses of lines that evoke various influences: organic structures like plants, hair, muscles, and fungi; natural systems such as waves and wind currents; geological strata; topographical maps; and sound. These linear networks are often based on tracings and rubbings of plywood, cracking plaster, and corroding metal---hand-drawn records of physical effects of nature and structural anomalies in her immediate surroundings. She thinks of these marks as the calligraphic signatures of quotidian natural effects and as interpretations of the material evidence of time.

Deanna Lee was born in Putnam County, New York, to parents from China and Taiwan, and raised in suburban Boston. She grew up spending time in her mother’s biology lab and taking classical-music lessons on several instruments for 14 years.

Comprising drawings, paintings, site-specific installations, and public artworks, her work interprets everyday traces of transformation in natural systems and the built environment.

Numerous venues have shown her work, including Robert Henry Contemporary, Wave Hill, The Drawing Center, and Trestle Projects. Her public artworks include a mural on jersey barriers for the NYC DOT and a window installation in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

Her honors include awards from: Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Asia Society, National Academy, Millay Colony, Saltonstall Foundation.

She was an expeditionary artist with The Clipperton Project, in Mexico, and was recently a resident artist on Governors Island with Works on Water and Underwater New York.

She lives and works in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Jane Sangerman

Jane Sangerman’s paintings exist in two worlds—one tangible, informed by the inherent entropy of the urban spaces she encounters daily and, the other, a vibrant metaphysical space that comes from within.

She attracted to populated areas with surfaces worn through human use. There is, no doubt, a romanticism in the decay of urban entropy, but it is also a record—a blueprint of lives lived. Her compositions are dappled with shapes created as tiles and peeling paint fall from decaying surfaces.

The Digit series heavily features the addition of her fingerprints, which are stamped with linoleum prints. These works can be considered self-portrait but with a different twist. The physicality of the process is the focus in these paintings.

Jane Sangerman lives and works in New York City and has exhibited nationally and internationally. In addition to teaching art at Ramapo College she has been a visiting artist and guest lecture at Parsons School of Design, The American School in Paris, The Glasgow School of Art, The University at Buffalo Anderson Gallery, and The University of Northern Arizona.

Jane received Fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ucross Foundation, The Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, The Jerome Foundation, and an Illinois Painters Three Award.

Her artwork is part of more than 25 public collections including the New York City Public Library and The Brooklyn Museum.

Sylvia Schwartz

For centuries textiles have been significant to the communication of identity for both the individual and collective psyche. Across the globe they have marked the passage of life cycle and community cycle events, worked into ceremonies involving birth, marriage and death. Entire nations have employed textiles as a representational tool of patriotism, from military uniforms to regional flags. In addition to signaling membership within organizations, class distinctions, and professions, textiles have permitted individuals to distinguish themselves and experiment with alternate identities.

The western art tradition of stretched canvas is further loaded with associations. Dressing Up and Queen each begin with the “neutral” blank slate that canvas has signified for centuries while adopting layered meanings by remaining un-stretched. The grid created by the fold lines continues the formalist grid of abstract expressionism. Like the abstract expressionists, these works exist as segments that extend beyond their physical boundaries. Their formation shifts between the spontaneous and the calculated. Each is composed with a combination of painting, sewing, and the incorporation of 3D-printed plastic objects, together notable for their temporal contrasts. The paint is immediate. Sewing the fabric is delayed in that the placement of pieces must be determined before the stitches can bind it together. The free flowing forms allow for a different rhythm of accident and improvisation. The 3D printed forms are removed from the human hand, while being programmed. It is the relationship between intended and unintended that adds this dimension of delayed time and chaos.

Sylvia Schwartz works with fabric, paper, plaster, resin, plastic, and photography. Schwartz has worked extensively at Dieu Donne Papermill, primarily casting with molds made directly from findings on the beach. Her work focuses on themes of movement and stillness, incorporating textiles, found objects, and forms from nature washed up on the shore.

Schwartz received a degree in fine art from the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia, and later studied sculpture at Columbia University. Her work has been shown in exhibitions in Manhattan, New Jersey, and Brooklyn, including BWAC, Nurture Art, Odetta, Lesley Heller Gallery and the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey. She lives and works in New York City.

Odetta’s Flat Files are curated to tie in with every exhibition. Diane Englander’s constructions will be featured throughout the studio walls in the back of the gallery and Jo Confino’’s large scale photograph will be installed on the back wall over the main countertop. In the cabinets, Sylvia Schwartz’s collages of materials and paint, and Deanna Lee’s works on paper and transparent color gels, continue the conversation presented in the main gallery. Opening each drawer in the cabinet presents interactive site-specific installations on a micro-scale that offer an element of surprise with the range of dimensionality and innovation each artist brings to this miniature curated space.

Found Object is the fourth in a series of color-focused exhibitions held in 2018 - 19. Odetta invited several artists, who would define themselves as colorists, to submit current portfolios for these shows. The exhibitions created from this call were Hot Stuff, January 2018, Mesmerize, September 2018, Las Gravitas, November/Dec 2018, and now Found Object. While color drives the artists to create, the subjects that emerge as narrative in their abstractions seem unlimited.