American artist Woody de Othello's practice spans sculpture, painting, and printmaking. His large-scale, colourful sculptures of distorted appliances are infused with human emotion, humour, and references to history.
Read MoreDe Othello was born in Miami, Florida. He received his BFA from Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton in 2013 and went on to pursue his MFA at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, graduating in 2017.
Woody de Othello's sculptural work is marked by a playful and fluid quality. These pieces, crafted from ceramics, glass, and bronze, often feature exaggerated figures, warped edges, and clumsy distortions. Taking inspiration from domestic objects such as pots, pans, box fans, and clocks, de Othello anthromorphises these objects by referencing their human use. De Othello is also greatly influenced by his Haitian ancestry, playing into and referencing Vodou religion, nkisi figures, and other animist traditions and artefacts.
In one work, de Othello sculpts a baby-blue-coloured air conditioning unit, which he distorts to appear concave, hinting that the unit has sucked into itself, exhausted by its own purpose. In another work, an orange telephone sits atop a blue stool, its handle slumped and held by the receiver as if it were tired from being talked to. These works are also often scaled up, appearing as both oversized and overworked appliances. Cool Composition (2019) is a human-sized sculpture of a yellow and distorted electric fan.
These sculptures, while whimsical in quality, are also imbued with political underpinnings. His work relating to air conditioning units not only reflect on the artist's body 'taking a breath', but also point towards the bodies of Africans brought to the Caribbean and forced into labour, as well as the ongoing police brutality towards Black men in America.
Apart from appliances, de Othello also creates vessels pointing at the range of emotions and psychological states in human experience. These objects, also with exaggerated and lopsided dimensions and shapes, combine pots with various body parts such as ears and limbs.
In de Othello's exhibition Breathing Room (2019) at the San José Museum of Art, his vessels appear beaten down, crushed, and exhausted. These works permeate a sombre tone in both form and colour, with most glazed in blues and blacks. De Othello also remarks on erasure by leaving these jugs faceless, yet worn down. Moreover, their titles seem to reflect a sense of alienation, such as in Self Talk and Empty Listening (both 2020), both of which feature vases adorned with large ears.
Woody de Othello has held solo exhibitions at the San José Museum of Art, California; Karma, New York; and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco. His work has also been included in the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, Slovenia and the Whitney Biennial, New York. His work has been collected by major institutions such as the MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.
De Othello's website can be found here and his Instagram can be found here.
Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2022
