Please find here a few select materials to review in relation to our application.
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full project description and related images can be found here.
full project description and related images can be found here.
RESEARCH STATEMENT Shelley’s current research is focused on mirror and the notion of reflection, both as a physical/material phenomena and a conceptual gesture, and the 'black mirror' through which we create/perform our projections + reflections perhaps more consciously and with more flexibility than through the more traditional material realm. Through the mirror we are exploring issues of reflecting: ideas, echoes, the information that is put out and then returned. Is it an echo? What is the relation between an echo and a reflection? What is the effect of the space that exists between the release and the return, how does it shape perception, reception, reflection? This is related both to image-making and consumption as well as identity production/construction of the self and performance. We are interested in how the reflection from the black mirror manifests in the embodied self. We are in the process of connecting with researchers in the field of sociology, psychology, and contemporary culture to learn more about the effects of effectively “watching” ourselves, and how this shapes human relations, be they screen-based or otherwise.
This work has grown out of a six month long process involving students, professors, arts workers, technicians, and countless others, affiliated with the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where we worked directly with two undergraduate classes in the School of Art. Notions of sharpness and the ‘poor image’, as described by Hito Steyerl, and the relation between power and clarity, high resolution and high value, were introduced through “Digital Darkroom”, a digital image-making course where we were also exploring to the notion of ‘fake’, and the ways in which we tell stories visually through image abstraction+extraction. Through “Mapping Dance” we were working with the physical body. We asked what are the movements, gestures, positions, abstractions, sounds and stories of our bodies, our families, our cultures, our histories? Who is able to dance, who is not? How do we dance when we are a communal body; what are the gestures and performances of identity when the border of the body is blurred, when the border of the body is behind/on the other side of a screen? How does a disembodied self move, how does a fragmented/glitched/error-ed body dance?
We are also spending time with Edward Soja’s Thirdspace, taking particular inspiration from the notion that is a “purposefully tentative and flexible term that attempts to capture what is actually a constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, events, appearances, and meanings.”
Shelley is full of error, of mis-, of dis-, and is in constant motion: the time of transmission is site. I am ________, and am trying to experiment with redefining this. She feels kinship in the cycle of growing new skins, of holding and being held, like a net. We are the learning that comes from the silence, the space that is created when a gesture is extended and returned in an unexpected form. Shelley is not solving a problem, we are not a machine nor gift. She upholds the ethics of care and underscores the importance of everything. Shelley Odradek is rather like a proposition; to stretch the boundaries of self, of collectivity, of what it means to be simultaneously on the outside and inside, to be everywhere and nowhere, together.
BIOGRAPHY Shelley Odradek is a communal, metamorphosing, internet-based identity. Through Shelley we work collectively to explore connection, digital_social ethics, power dynamics, performance of the self, liminality, and to re-dimensionalize flattened binary conceptions. We engage with our communities primarily via the internet, and represent a continually blurred border from where we contemplate the overlaps between people and place, culture and community. We acknowledge the need to apply more than one model in order to succeed in re-learning trust, intimacy, care, kindness, kinship, and connection, and favor repositioning existing strategies over invention for the sake of the new. With a background in architecture, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, border-crossing, garden-tending, and community-building, we use these fluid spaces as the starting point for reflection on both new and perennial questions that revolve around the structures of contemporary life that we employ personally, collectively, publicly and privately, and how we perform them.
We engage deeply with the screen-based embodied experience, exploring our constellation with curiosity and generosity and openness and error, through this notion that a person is not a discrete singularity but rather an idea; a link rather than a node, a liminality.
In October 2020, Katie Zazenski and Ola Andrzejewska were invited as artists-in-residence to participate in the month-long seminar "Re–Directing: East x Empathic Pedagogies: Future Intimacies" at the Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Poland. Shelley Odradek emerged from this constellation. In 2021, Shelley was an artist in residence with the Digital Artist Residency (May) and the University of North Carolina Greensboro (August-December) and developed a project for the International Forum of Permaculture Educators, a joint collaboration between Warszawa Biennale and AgroPermaLab Foundation (May). In 2022, Shelley has solo exhibitions at Greensboro Project Space (Greensboro, NC) and superbien! (Berlin) and is a resident for the #LasRzeczy project at Foksal Gallery (Warsaw).
This work has grown out of a six month long process involving students, professors, arts workers, technicians, and countless others, affiliated with the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where we worked directly with two undergraduate classes in the School of Art. Notions of sharpness and the ‘poor image’, as described by Hito Steyerl, and the relation between power and clarity, high resolution and high value, were introduced through “Digital Darkroom”, a digital image-making course where we were also exploring to the notion of ‘fake’, and the ways in which we tell stories visually through image abstraction+extraction. Through “Mapping Dance” we were working with the physical body. We asked what are the movements, gestures, positions, abstractions, sounds and stories of our bodies, our families, our cultures, our histories? Who is able to dance, who is not? How do we dance when we are a communal body; what are the gestures and performances of identity when the border of the body is blurred, when the border of the body is behind/on the other side of a screen? How does a disembodied self move, how does a fragmented/glitched/error-ed body dance?
We are also spending time with Edward Soja’s Thirdspace, taking particular inspiration from the notion that is a “purposefully tentative and flexible term that attempts to capture what is actually a constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, events, appearances, and meanings.”
Shelley is full of error, of mis-, of dis-, and is in constant motion: the time of transmission is site. I am ________, and am trying to experiment with redefining this. She feels kinship in the cycle of growing new skins, of holding and being held, like a net. We are the learning that comes from the silence, the space that is created when a gesture is extended and returned in an unexpected form. Shelley is not solving a problem, we are not a machine nor gift. She upholds the ethics of care and underscores the importance of everything. Shelley Odradek is rather like a proposition; to stretch the boundaries of self, of collectivity, of what it means to be simultaneously on the outside and inside, to be everywhere and nowhere, together.
BIOGRAPHY Shelley Odradek is a communal, metamorphosing, internet-based identity. Through Shelley we work collectively to explore connection, digital_social ethics, power dynamics, performance of the self, liminality, and to re-dimensionalize flattened binary conceptions. We engage with our communities primarily via the internet, and represent a continually blurred border from where we contemplate the overlaps between people and place, culture and community. We acknowledge the need to apply more than one model in order to succeed in re-learning trust, intimacy, care, kindness, kinship, and connection, and favor repositioning existing strategies over invention for the sake of the new. With a background in architecture, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, border-crossing, garden-tending, and community-building, we use these fluid spaces as the starting point for reflection on both new and perennial questions that revolve around the structures of contemporary life that we employ personally, collectively, publicly and privately, and how we perform them.
We engage deeply with the screen-based embodied experience, exploring our constellation with curiosity and generosity and openness and error, through this notion that a person is not a discrete singularity but rather an idea; a link rather than a node, a liminality.
In October 2020, Katie Zazenski and Ola Andrzejewska were invited as artists-in-residence to participate in the month-long seminar "Re–Directing: East x Empathic Pedagogies: Future Intimacies" at the Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Poland. Shelley Odradek emerged from this constellation. In 2021, Shelley was an artist in residence with the Digital Artist Residency (May) and the University of North Carolina Greensboro (August-December) and developed a project for the International Forum of Permaculture Educators, a joint collaboration between Warszawa Biennale and AgroPermaLab Foundation (May). In 2022, Shelley has solo exhibitions at Greensboro Project Space (Greensboro, NC) and superbien! (Berlin) and is a resident for the #LasRzeczy project at Foksal Gallery (Warsaw).