PUNCHED
2018-2019
Punched is a series of unique hand-punched snapshots from my family archive, layered and adhered.
The concept of the work is two-fold. The first is how we learn to look at the subject of snapshots – for example, a person, a dog, a building, a car. In doing so we may overlook the periphery, the outskirts of the main event. This may be where important clues are. Punching out the main subjects is an act of teasing and censorship. It transitions the subject to one of process.
The second is the circular shape of the punches. They become little clouds of thought, or speech bubbles in space. Black holes where information or knowledge continues to leak out. These spaces invite the imagination to fill them back up again.
BIO
Odette England received an MFA with Honors from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012 and a PhD in Art & Art History from the Australian National University in 2018.
England’s work has shown nationally and internationally in more than 85 exhibitions. Venues include George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film (Rochester, NY); Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL); New Mexico Museum of Art (Santa Fe, NM); Fort Wayne Museum of Art (Fort Wayne, IN); RISD Museum (Providence, RI); Colorado Photographic Arts Center (Denver, CO); State Library of South Australia (Adelaide, South Australia); Center for Photography at Woodstock (Woodstock, NY); Perth Center for Photography (Perth, Western Australia); MacDonald Stewart Art Center, University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada); Durham Art Gallery (Durham, England, UK) AND Filter Photo (Chicago, IL).
England has been published in American Photo, Photograph, The Brooklyn Rail, Photo District News, Hotshoe International, the British Journal of Photography, Australian Art Monthly, Musee Magazine, GUP Magazine, Lenscratch, Feature Shoot and Fraction Magazine, among others.
In 2015, she was a finalist for the Australian Photo Book of the Year Award for her monograph Lover of Home.
Awards England has received include the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Emerging Photographers Award (UK winner, twice) and the CENTER $5,000 Project Launch Award. England is also a recipient of the HotShoe Magazine Photofusion Photography Award (2010) and The Print Center Honorary Council Award for Excellence (2018).
Recent artist residencies include the prestigious invitation-only Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in Captiva, Florida (2018).
England is currently Assistant Professor of Photography and Graduate Program Director at RISD. She is also director and curator of the Winter Garden Photograph project, for which she received a $5,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation (2018). This project will culminate in her first edited volume Keeper of the Hearth. The book will launch in Spring 2020, published by Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam with a foreword by Charlotte Cotton.
England is represented in the US (east coast) by Klompching Gallery.