Nonney Oddlokken:

The Improbability of Hummingbirds

“A Dream of Rousseau” Photo courtesy of the artist.

May 1-30, 2024

FIRST WEDNESDAY OPENING: May 1, FROM 6 - 9PM

ARTICULATE ARTIST TALK: SUNDAY, may 5, AT 4PM.

NORMAL GALLERY HOURS: TUE - SUN, 12PM - 6PM

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After living through an incredibly intense year due to severe house damage from Hurricane Ida … which in itself, took place during the Covid-19 pandemic, Nonney Oddlokken felt there was no structure in her life. Rebuilding a destroyed house at any point is a devastatingly emotional task, but a global pandemic brought it to a plangent level. Every day was a whole new set of struggles. All that was even “Covid-Normal” was lost. Her daily creative routine was eradicated. She felt like she was in this never-ending suspended state of fight or flight, and was desperately in need of any remnants of structure. Something that could give her a clue as to what was next.

“Every Being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments of time, and at the same time they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being.”~ Dōgen, Zeno, Uji
“The Hummingbird - A Creature which would be IMPOSSIBLE if it did not already exist.” ~Salman Rushdie, Midnights Children.
Panentheism: GOD is all the universal knowledge that is known and all that isn’t. God is greater than the universe.
“The body of work presented here is a discussion about God, or rather, GODS. Who are "Gods for people like us?" Think about how unlikely it is for any one of us to be born, with odds as staggering as 1 in 400 trillion, yet here we are, human beings - Time Beings connected to each other and to all forms of time, as Dōgen explains.
Time Beings in the “time being,” I depicted here as two forms of hummingbirds. Time Beings: the hummingbird as we know them, colorful and tiny unique creatures capable of flying backwards and forwards. We are the Time Beings - shaped by a ponderous of events that created our existence and our time on earth.
The time being is represented by the shadows of hummingbirds. Existing only in the realm of the unknowable. Their presence transcends the spectrum our human experience, and we can only perceive fleeting and veiled sparks of the unknown. Like hummingbirds, we Time Beings exist against all odds, manifestations of the improbable, yet are acutely aware of our perceived limited existence. It's with this awareness, often in fear, that God is anthropomorphized and subjected to the human condition. Some even try to encapsulate God within their own personalized bell jars of specific human experiences. But, isn’t most discourse about God just a veil disguising our attempt to understand our existence and perceived non-existence?
In this series of work, I ask the viewer not to ponder the existence of God, but to confront the stark reality of our inability to ever understand God as a totality. To even begin to describe God is to anthropomorphize something that transcends words, concepts and thoughts of the human experience.” - Nonney Oddlokken

Oddlokken is a native of New Orleans, whose works have been exhibited throughout Louisiana, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the Gulf Coast, Oklahoma, and South Carolina, in addition to having work in the Southern Ohio Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

This exhibition is presented alongside the latest works from Anita Cooke, Linda Jeffers, and John Isiah Walton. All works from these artists are on view, free of charge, during regular gallery hours (12 - 6 p.m., Tue - Sun) from May 1 - 30, 2024.