press release:
February 9th – April 5th, 2012 New York, New York – enter:gallery is proud to present new work by Jenny Odell in a solo exhibition titled Signs of Life. The series is comprised of found imagery from Google Earth, clustered into delicate arrangements. The opening reception will be held on Thursday evening, February 9th, 2012, 7:00 – 9:00 pm at enter:gallery, 60–62 E 11th St. 3rd Floor. Food and drinks will be provided.

Jenny Odell is like a researcher investigating the topographical landscape of the Earth, its inhabitants, and their behavior. In Signs of Life, she continues in her methods of categorizing and grouping detailed Google Earth images, but focuses in more on the human language, structure, and systems that are visible to satellite imagery. Using Google Earth’s recently added 45–degree angle view, Odell groups together text and logo filled billboards and signs. Signs of Life is a deeper investigation not only into how humans communicate through advertisement, but the physical structures that are made and maintained for this reason.

Jenny Odell is a graphic artist hailing from the Bay Area. Her work has been exhibited at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Google Headquarters, and Les Rencontres D’Arles in France. She has also been featured in KQED’s Gallery Crawl, the NPR Picture Show, Pop-up Magazine, Rhizome, Gizmodo, Design Sponge, and ESPN Magazine, plus many publications abroad. Please visit www.jennyodell.com.

About enter:gallery enter:gallery is a new gallery in Manhattan highlighting emerging and mid-career artists. Located in the space of two leading marketing agencies that merge creativity and business, enter:gallery specializes in exposing new audiences to contemporary art in the entertainment, fashion, and technology industries. enter:gallery is open by appointment 9–7 Monday through Friday. Please direct all inquiries to:entergallery@enternewmedia.com

I’m very close to done with my new series, Signs of Life– collections of billboards, gargantuan shopping center signs, etc. These will be shown for the first time in New York (alongside the Satellite Collections and Everyone on Google Earth.) Scouring Google Satellite for Waffle House signs and 1-800-GET-THIN billboards has also given me good occasion to keep up the Satellite Tourist tumblr, which is becoming quite the archive of satellite anomalies (such as this fire I found in Baton Rouge):

All the People on Google Earth continues to get a surprising amount of press, including this interview in Guernica and this feature in Wired Italy, in which they describe me as “living proof that contemporary art produced technologically is mediated not only by male geeks.”

Lastly, a couple of friends of mine are having openings in the East Bay this Friday (the 13th). Their work is amazing and definitely worth stopping by to see! First is the lovely Alissa Polan‘s “Goldie Gallop’s Chaos, Destruction & Shovels Extravaganza” at mauve? gallery.

rawr!

That opening will be at 7pm in the mauve? office. The same night, you can catch Luca Antonucci’s work alongside Cybele Lyle’s at the Royal Nonesuch.

Hope to see you there!

in progress...

(Not so) secret: I’ve been collecting billboards all day, day after day.

As you can imagine, as I’m looking for these, I find quite a few delectable oddities. For now I’ve collected them on Satellite Tourist, an ongoing tumblr for your viewing pleasure. A few favorites:

one of these lanes is unsafe to drive in

wedding on top of the san francisco art institute

image splicing causes duplicate cars and half cars

fabled sale gorilla

Eric Fisher, Locals and Tourists #3 (GTWA #4): San Francisco

One more reminder to drop by Intersection for the Arts this Friday evening for the opening of the thoroughly wonderful “Here be Dragons: Mapping Information and Imagination.” Here’s Intersection’s descriptions of the artists whose work (including mine!) you’ll be seeing:

JD Beltran & Scott Minneman (www.jdbeltran.com & www.onomy.com) are a collborative team who have produced the Magic Story Table, a large interactive multi-media “story table” that fuses maps, texts, images, sound, interactivity, and storytellers’ own voices. Using video projection of online satellite mapping onto a table surface, viewers can interact with the projected map by tilting and turning the table to virtually fly all over the world to discover stories embedded within the map itself. Once positioned over a specific geographic location, the viewer can zoom into these locations and hear and see dozens of stories related to that place.

Val Britton (www.valbritton.com) makes immersive, collaged works on paper that draw on the language of maps. The impetus for this work was Britton’s longing to connect to her father, a cross-country truck driver who died when the artist was a teenager. Based on U.S. road maps, routes her father often travelled, and an invented conglomeration, mutation, and fragmentation of these passageways, her work maps not only physical locations but also the blurry terrain of memory and imagination. She will create a new installation, constructing visual metaphors for travelling, retelling stories, and reconstructing journeys.

Eric Fischer (www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf) is a photographer, programmer, and amateur digital cartographer who turns large amounts of data into visually striking images. He mines data found online to examine the information people anonymously leave in their wake on websites like Flickr, Cabspotting, NextBus, and Picasa in order to reveal the patterns of major cities, resulting in vivid maps that provide fresh ways to look at race, trafic, tourism, and crime. Selections from Fischer’s different mapping series – including “Locals and Tourists,” “Race and Ethnicity,” See something or say something,” and “Cabspotting” – will be included in the exhibition.

Flora Kao (www.floratkao.blogspot.com), an artist based in Los Angeles, CA, works in installation, painting, sculpture, video and photography. Her work is inspired by the psychological potential of urban and constructed spaces. In excavating details like the hum of electricity, the relentless city grid, or the sterility of institutional space, she seeks to inspire a heightened awareness of our relationship to the built environment. A triptych from her “City Studies” painting series will be shown, depicting an extensive city grid underneath layers of texture and blue tones, reading like a historical blueprint of how to map a large city.

Wendy MacNaughton (www.wendymacnaughton.com) has been chronicling San Francisco for years through character studies of commuters and mental maps of different neighborhoods. Building upon her social work experience (she has a Masters in International Social Welfare), she has documented various populations in the city in their own words, including Market Street chess players and Civic Center Farmers’ Market farmers. She creates a new series of portraits of people living and working in the neighborhood of 5th and Mission Streets, where Intersection is located, with corresponding psychological and physical maps.

Tucker Nichols‘ (www.tuckernichols.com) work is simultaneously elegant, low-tech, humorous, and deceptively simple, and usually involves drawing and painting on paper or directly on walls and windows. Common themes include fragments of found text, anonymous buildings, maps without any sense of scale, and other ambiguous remnants of our everyday world. Much of his work borders on abstraction, as if the presented subject has been left behind for so long it is no longer recognizable. Nichols’ work is as much about process as it is about the resulting work. He will create a site-specific piece, referencing map-life forms and structures.

Jenny Odell (www.jennyodell.com) creates digital collages from satellite imagery, specifically things isolated from Google Satellite View – parking lots, football stadiums, landfills. The view from a satellite is not a human one, but it is precisely from this perspective that we can read our own humanity, in all of its tiny, reliably repetitive marks on the face of the earth. Odell creates new pieces of public plazas in San Francisco, such as Dolores Park and Pier 39, where everything has been removed but the people in the plazas, resulting in works that surprisingly reflect the geography of these areas with minimal information.

Matthew Picton (www.matthewpicton.com) is a British-born sculptor based in Portland, OR. Cartography and the inherent beauty of lines and forms that arise from natural topography and built environments influence his work. His series of “city sculptures” look at the organism of the city as being shaped by social, political, economic, and topographic factors, illustrating a systemic pattern of human civilization. His work included in this show, “San Francisco 1906,” is a portrait of downtown after the 1906 earthquake and fire, painstakingly constructed out of burnt covers of the 1936 film “San Francisco” starring Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald.

Lordy Rodriguez‘s (www.hosfeltgallery.com) work emanates from the human urge to locate ourselves by charting our environment in precise detail and utilizes the language of cartography to transcend map-making into abstracted, imaginary terrains. He often reconfigures boundaries and uses text to question social and political classification. Dislocation is a constant theme throughout his work, and he frequently investigates the interchangeability of symbol and meaning.

day 347 of lisa congdon's collection a day

It’s noon, and I’ve been awake for 5 hours. Anyone who knows me knows that this is not normal! But it’s with good cause: Lisa Congdon was the speaker today at Creative Mornings. She’s the brain behind A Collection a Day (which was featured on Things Organized Neatly, a tumblr that also posted my ships print at one point), as well as some lovely paintings and illustrations. She shared some really on-point observations about the recent trend in, well, organizing things neatly: namely, that in a world filled with chaos and stuff, we find it calming and satisfying to see it arranged. She also pointed out that having one object in the context of like objects allows us to see it differently– something additional becomes visible when we see not one plastic baby doll hand, but 28. I even got a little shout-out… thanks Lisa!

In other news, as I’ve probably mentioned, some of my new pieces (All the People on Google Earth) will be in a show at Intersection for the Arts next month titled “Here be Dragons: Mapping Information and Imagination.” This is the first time I’ll be showing this body of work, so I’m pretty excited. From the press release:

Intersection for the Arts presents Here Be Dragons: Mapping Information and Imagination, a group exhibition that features artists who utilize the tools, language, and strategies of mapping to distill and interpret large quantities of information and data, while also imaginatively envisioning place through charting stories, history, emotion, and ideas.

Mapping is a fundamental part of how we relate to and make sense of our surroundings. More than just tools for getting from A to B, maps are selective records of the wider world, loaded with creative, and often subjective, meaning.

Historically, both scientists and artists have created and used maps in innovative ways to visualize information and study the world from new perspectives, revealing patterns and phenonema otherwise unseen. The exhibition references the phrase “here be dragons” used in medieval times to denote unexplored territories, where mapmakers placed sea serpents and other mythological creatures in blank areas of maps. Like cartographers centuries ago, the artists in this exhibition map both the real and the imaginary. As Intersection continues to grow in its new location, this exhibition reinvigorates how we can see the world around us as well as providing insight to places unknown and unfamiliar.

Some fantastic artists will be featured in the show: JD Beltran & Scott Minneman, Val Britton, Eric Fischer, Flora Kao, Wendy MacNaughton, Tucker Nichols, Matthew Picton and Lordy Rodriguez. The show runs from October 21 to January 14, with the opening on Friday October 21 from 7 to 9. Intersection for the Arts recently moved from its longtime home in the Mission to a great space in the Chronicle Building on 5th and Mission.

In the meantime, the Satellite Collections continue to travel around the world– literally, since the curators of “From Here On” are touring the show around Europe for several years. The Satellite Collections have also shown up in Zeitmagazin (the magazine for the Die Zeit) and Neon, two German magazines, and Knack, a Belgian Magazine. In fact, my copy of Neon just showed up in the mail the other day:

And lastly, a big thanks to everyone who came to my talk at Queen’s Nails Projects a couple weeks ago. It went really well. I’ve been meaning to write something up, vaguely equivalent to the presentation I gave, and post it here… coming soon.

And here’s an extremely hackneyed translation (a la Google Translate and some guesses on my part) of the blurb they’ve written about my work:

Earlier, people looked to the sky to learn something about themselves and the universe. They had their telescopes directed toward the distance, in order to explore the bottom of the big picture. Today, the view has been reversed; with one click in Google Earth, we look from above down to earth. This view from the top down does not explain to us the interrelation between the earth and the stars and planets. But this journey over the screen, in which the boundaries of countries disappear, has developed its own almost meditative magic.
Jenny Odell has flown all over the world with a mouse in her hand. For days and nights she has looked over the surface of the world and always found the same shapes, uniform traces of human existence. Aircraft and waterslides, grain silos and effluent ponds, basketball courts and baseball fields, swimming pools and parking lots. She has collected them and removed them from the virtual surface. From snippets of reality, Odell composes a new cosmos. This is crafting territory: the snippets are digital, but the final images resemble collages from our analog childhood. Massive, portly cooling towers can weightlessly fly into a cloud. Sewage ponds are shaped into an autumnal bloom. Swimming pools look as though Odell has thrown them into a kaleidoscope, transforming them with each spin into a new sparkling stone.
Jenny Odell studied Design in San Francisco and was born in 1986 in Mountain View, California, where the headquarters of Google is today. She calls her work Satellite Collections, because every detail is taken from satellites. Jenny Odell says that the view from above the earth, which Google has made so ordinary, is not one of the human eye, but the defamiliarized view through a machine. But it assures us that we exist, even if only part of a vast virtual handicraft.
Jenny Odell plays with our perceptions. When looking at her collages one wonders: is it an attempt to decipher an organic system with a microscope? There are strange shapes, which are equal and have found a secret order in each other. Only if we want to zoom in closer do we discover the many small details, the differences. Behind this high-up order, we find reality where Google Earth is out of focus.

I’ve also finished cutting out all the people on Pier 39. It’s interesting that you can make out the shape of Pier 39 by the way people have arranged themselves; it’s also funny that there are many more people on the left than on the right, perhaps because of the view of the Golden Gate Bridge to the west.

If you’re in town, the finished pieces (these and more) will be in a group show at Intersection for the Arts in October. Details to come…