Invocation

Loren Eiferman

Camille Eskell

Charles Geiger

The artists of Invocation focus on healing, either a specific person, or thing when engaged in the act of making their works of art. The magical qualities inherent in their spirited requests can be seen in the finished work. Through the power of imagination and intense concentration, their objects make our humanity visible and vulnerable.

In conjunction with the exhibition Odetta features two artists in our flat files that are participating in Creative Tech Week 2017. Jeff Becker and Greg Garvey have produced works for our Flat Files that address geological time, persistence of nature, and the fragility of our planet through video works.

Loren Eiferman

Over many decades Loren Eiferman has created and mastered a unique technique of working with wood—her primary material. First, she begins with a drawing of an idea. Then she takes a daily walk in the woods surrounding her studio and collects tree limbs and long sticks that have fallen to the ground. She never chops down a living tree or uses green wood. Eiferman allows the wood time to cure in the studio to make sure it won’t check or crack. Next, she debarks the branch and looks for shapes found within each piece of wood. Using a Japanese hand saw, she cuts and connect these small shapes together using dowels and wood glue. Then, all the open joints get filled with a home made putty, which is then sanded so she can see the newly formed shapes. This process is until the new sculpture appears like the original line drawing but in space. She wants the work to appear as if it grew in nature, when in fact each sculpture is composed of over 100 small pieces of wood that are seamlessly jointed together. Her work can be called the ultimate recycling: taking the detritus of nature and giving it a new life.

We have all at one point or another picked up a stick from the ground—touched the wood, peeled the bark off with our fingernails. Her work taps into that same primal desire of touching nature and being close to it. Trees connect us back to nature, back to this Earth. Her work has a meditative quality to it—a quiet, calming energy.

Her influences are many; from looking at nature and plant life on this Earth to researching the heavenly bodies in the images beamed back from the Hubble Telescope. From studying ancient Buddhist mandalas and designs to delving deeper into quantum physics. And from researching mysterious manuscripts to studying the patterns inside our brains.

For Invocation, we are exhibiting her newest body of work, inspired by the illustrations found in the Voynich Manuscript. This 250-page book, is believed to have been written in the early 15th century, of a mysterious origin and purpose.

Written in an unknown language and currently housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book Library, the manuscript has eluded all attempts in the intervening centuries to decode or decipher its purpose and meaning. This enigmatic book is divided into 6 different sections (herbal, astronomical, biological, cosmological, pharmaceutical and recipes). Having discovered the images contained in this codex over the Internet, Eiferman felt an immediate, profound and inexplicable connection to this manuscript and its creator. The artist is currently transposing the “herbal” section of manuscript into sculptures. This section has drawings in it of plants and flowers that do not really exist in nature—past or present. These aren’t just pretty images of flowers—they also contain the wacky root systems and seemingly out of proportion leaves, stamens and pistils.

Loren Eiferman was born in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from SUNY Purchase. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the Tri-State region including gallery and museum exhibitions in the Hudson Valley and Connecticut. Her work is included in numerous corporate and private art collections. In 2014 she was awarded a NYC MTA Arts & Design art commission to produce steel railings for a Metro North train station. She currently maintains a studio in the Hudson Valley.

Charles Geiger

This recent work continues his series “Quasibotanics”. This somewhat surrealist approach to painting uses botanical or quasi-botanical imagery of leaves, trees, and rhizomes forms as an organic painterly lexicon.

Currently his ideological position moves from an apocalyptic to a post-apocalyptic vision, with a more assertive role in the process of renewal and healing. The human beings’ negative impact on the larger biome is at a critical juncture where perhaps the artist, acting as shaman or as an invocateur is now needed. From prehistoric cave depictions to this present age of Anthropocene, Geiger’s quasi- botanical paintings are a painter’s ecstatic bridge to the environment.

As pictorial metaphor, expansive networks of leaves and rhizomes are depicted in a continuous process of breaking and reconnecting. The botanic gestures reflect a life-process where natural systems (biomes) flow, converge and teeter back and forth between entropy and order.

This botanic grammar ritualizes inside a dual-dimensioned or interstitial landscape. It operates as an inaudible organic vocabulary within a unique pictorial space somewhere between the visually very large and the visually very small. Here the rhizome is an invocative metaphor about connections and disconnections within the larger biome. Patterning processes interweave the life affirming energy of sprouting leaves and regenerating rhizome forms as they reorient into new interconnecting networks.

These paintings are interior landscapes having perhaps a magical property. They are at once fluid surrealist visions and shamanistic dreamscapes that invoke absorption, renewal, and healing.

Charles Geiger studied painting at East Carolina University, and Computer Science at Millersville University.

While working in a science research lab he developed an eye for the physical substructure of things, and began to incorporate scientific (primarily botanical) imagery and concepts into his paintings.

Concerned with climate change, his painting practice reinterprets Nature using scale shifts in compositions that intermix leaf, tree, and Rhizome forms into surrealist interstitial landscapes where rituals of rejuvenation, healing and hope are invoked in a practice he calls “Quasibotanics”.

Geiger paints full time in his studio in Poughkeepsie, New York. He has had numerous exhibitions throughout the greater New York metropolitan region. His work is now in both private and public collections.

Camille Eskell

For Camille Eskell, the psyche is a metaphor and a testimonial, the culmination

As the third girl in a turbulent Iraqi Jewish family from Bombay, Eskell felt impelled to explore the psychological legacy that shaped her perceptions, identity, and motivations. Her work examines these cultural and family dynamics, with themes of vulnerability, rebirth, gender relationships, and social convention emerging across several series.

Her practice encompasses two- and three-dimensional disciplines, including drawing, painting, photo-based imagery, and sculpture; the techniques are often integrated and combined with a variety of materials, found objects, and ready-mades which form layers of meaning.

Award-winning artist Camille Eskell exhibits her work extensively in solo and group shows throughout the U.S. and abroad, including Mexico, South America, and Wales. Current group shows are Invocation at Odetta (Brooklyn, NY) and Between I and Thou at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, (Peeksill, NY). Recent exhibitions include Fem-Fragments at the Corridor Gallery, Rush Arts Foundation (Brooklyn, NY), Women's Work at Western Connecticut State University, Seeking Space: Making the Future at David & Schweitzer Contemporary (Brooklyn, NY), and Facie: Self-Portrait Interpreted by 25 Artists at Galerie Protege (NY), among others.

In fall 2017 she will be presenting a one-person show of current work, The Fez As Storyteller series, at the State University of New York at Geneseo, NY.

Eskell's work is in public and private collections, including the Chrysler Museum of Art (VA), the Housatonic Museum of Art (CT), the Islip Art Museum (NY), and the Westport Permanent Art Collection (CT).

She has received reviews in numerous publications, such as The New York Times, The Hartford Courant, CT Post, D’arte magazine, Art New England, The Examiner, and Manhattan Arts.

Among her awards are fellowships in drawing and painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts respectively, as well as residencies at Weir Farm/National Historic site and the Vermont Studio Center. The artists holds a Master of Fine Arts from Queens College/CUNY, lives and works in CT, and maintains a studio in Chelsea, NY.

Odetta’s Flat Files are curated and change with every exhibition. Jeff Becker and Greg Garvey, also participating in Creative Tech Week, are creating animations that are site specific to the cabinets themselves and focus on our planet and climate change. Toni Simon (poetry) and Susan Stair (Wood Wide Web) will have works also in the drawers and featured on the back wall of the studio that introduce language, poetry, and how trees communicate with each other.

Odetta is a Bushwick-based gallery created and run by artist Ellen Hackl Fagan. The gallery exhibits the works of contemporary artists focusing on Color Theory, Minimalism, Glyphs, Buddha Mind, Fluxus, History, Humor, Psychedelia, Ephemera, Science, Math and Music.