Exhibitions —

You can only hear a subsong if you listen closely. Young birds’ closed-billed warbling, akin to infantile babbling, are a product of mimicry, invention, and play. These nascent vocalizations are early experiments in forming a language, before conventional birdsong is adopted.

Winona Sloane Odette invites us to suspend perceived destinies in favor of failure and misuse. When objects fail in one system, another opens. The child fails into a person, the pet fails into an animal, the object fails into a metaphor.

Makeshift speakers, constructed from boxes of trimmings from New York’s garment district, are arranged on opposite ends of the room and encircle the exhibition space within a feedback loop. The boxes, once full of gems, buttons, pearls, and appliqués, are emptied of such accessories. They are reduced to surface, color, and form, shifting focus to their atmosphere. The silver-plated dog bowls embedded in their surfaces turn the containers into amplifying devices, like subwoofers anticipating vibration.

The convex underside of another dog bowl is inset flush into the back gallery wall. Below it, a large concave horn pierces through the surface of the wall, just above the floor. Originally part of a phonograph, an early recording device, the horn both funnels sound through its body as well as expels it. The bay windows across the room open up to the street. These are the only source of audible sound in the gallery and act as a giant receiver, reflecting back at the void.

In the corner, a trimmings box fills with a jumble of heads, torsos, and limbs of soft toys that take the shape of stuffed animals, forming an ambiguous mound. Fashioned from stuffed socks, the plushie components hold the memory-invoking imprint of sweat and the comfort of familiar scents. These scattered parts have not been dismantled, but instead await assembly into a whole.

Detached high heels and eggs molded from a mixture of tree sap and wax rest in the basin of a slow-feed bowl for puppies, whose form allows communal feeding. Some eggs sprout heels of their own, a kind of feminine appendage signaling metamorphosis, while others remain unchanged, lying in wait. The eggs, all in varying states of transformation, reflect back at themselves and each other in the warped, mirrored surface of the dish.

The nestled assortments of objects peek out from the sides of their confinements with a sense of anticipation, as if on the cusp of becoming. Odette rearranges our expectations; Subsong relays poetic suspension. Plushie components appear again amidst an array of bells and abandoned rubber ball fragments, cracking open like eggshells in a playpen. Crafted from sound-absorbing industrial felt, and matched to the dimensions of a bass trap, the tray rests atop a sheet of gold tyvek; a play mat, a stage, a floor plan, a piano.

— Daisy Sanchez

Winona Sloane Odette (b. 1998, Minneapolis, MN) lives and works in Queens, NY. She studied at the School of Visual Arts and the Cooper Union. Recent group exhibitions include AUGUST 2023, Veronica, Seattle, WA (2023), Anything can pass before the eyes of a person, Derosia, New York, NY (2023), The Disappearing City, CASTLE, Los Angeles, CA (2023) and Poem Objects at april april, Brooklyn, NY (2022).