Visuals, Poetics and the Artist
The Silver Braid
Summer feature 2006

Mannequin Envy



Scott Odom
Artist's Statement:
As an artist, what propels me into an act of creation is most often a sense of mood, or to be more accurate, a desire to capture a certain mood, a feeling in the body.

Intellect and ideas all happen up in the head, and I think it is wonderful and necessary to keep that part of you engaged, but what is to me much more interesting is the way that good art and good writing can bypass the intellect and go directly to the body experience of emotion.

odom06 I am reminded of what Emily Dickenson said about good poetry, that it takes the top of her head off. I think what she was referring to is both the visceral, gut-wrenching impact of it, and also the way that the brain becomes a sort of vestigial organ. You can go ahead and perform a sort of post-mortem exam of the experience, but it is not the intended target of the experience.

 I want the heart. I want the gut. That is what is operating the system when I write or when I create my artwork. Or rather, these are the final arbiters of what becomes a successful piece. If it doesn't hit me in the gut, if it doesn't feel in some way like a fishhook stuck in my flesh, then it isn't a piece of art. It might be lovely, it might be technically fine, but it goes into the trash if it doesn't pull its weight in that way.

Now I don't expect the reader or the viewer to have the same experience that I have when I read one of my poems or look at one of my photographs. Art, good art, has a way of inhabiting each new host in a way that is unique to that person. I am no longer surprised when someone gets something out of, or puts something into, a piece that I as the artist never consciously intended- it is in there, it is inherent in the piece, but unless you are a lot more developed than I am as an artist, you can't possibly be aware of and intend everything that happens, everything that is latent, in a work of art. I think that my artwork and my poetry both explore the same ground, that of the human landscape.

As a cop, this is my stomping ground and the source of all the conflict and angst and despair and love and longing that drives my art. It's a fertile place. Of course, it's all fake, too. I take real crimes, real dead bodies and real horrors, and I turn them into fictional narratives. In my artwork, I create fake scenes with little dolls and toy figures, and turn them into what seems to me to be something approaching the real world- or at least the feelings that the real world evokes in me when I watch it. The human heart is a complex and confounding thing, and I always ask my art to attempt to make room for that complexity.

I love this world and everything that's in it. I want my work to be a celebration of that love.


Poetry of Scott Odom

WHAT IS REVEALED AS LIGHT

Our empty bed is abandoned
to the silent house. You are gone and
my hands are stained with burnt umber,
yellow ochre, mars black.

Working loosely,
I block in the shadows.
The light spaces leap
into being.

What is revealed then.

A white house in the woods, near a lake.
Dark cypress trees that threaten to sway
in a wind you can almost feel.

A long coin of sepia light,
ribboned with black water.


When the  painting’s finished,
your sable brushes lean in a tin can,
wet and spent. A bad husband,
I mistreat them, leave them
splayed and broken.

In the kitchen a simple table
holds our plates, a glass of cold water,
a broken loaf, my hard
and empty arms.




 DANCE, DANCE.

Murakami always
brings you to a tunnel or an
abandoned well, some
dark place.

He knows what
he's up to.

Somebody comes into your kitchen,
he's a metaphor. He'll tell you
to put on your best pants,
the silk ones with the
nubby texture, dark gray.

And he'll get your dress shoes
from the closet. He'll look
in your refrigerator for some
mineral water. Shake his head
at the Diet Pepsi, the Bud
Lite.

Make conversation, he'll linger, explain
the finer points of interstellar travel,
the mind-meld, the venus
butterfly technique of clitoral
stimulation. He'll be thinking

about a tall, blue bottle
of sparkling water, and a twist
of lemon. The aromatic oils released
from the peel, the metronomic rise

of the compact bubbles.

He won't be moved when you
bend down, sobbing, and grasp at his pants,
your offers of gold coin, your television
shows, your sad clown
paintings.

He knows it is inevitable, knows longing
is the superlative emotion and that
in this world, at least, the sheep holds
its own shears and stands naked and trembling
under the light of its own
bare bulb.


At the narrow shaft, you
may hesitate.
He'll tell you to take
the plunge.


Where a cracker awaits, a
patch of moss, a broken
cup.
PIETA

The young man on the slab is too beautiful
and it shocks me in a way I am ill prepared for.
He looks like a Renaissance painting of the dead Christ.
It sounds like bullshit but his face is angelic.

His body is flawless except for the single stab wound
above his left nipple. The blade pierced his lung and
the pericardial sac and then his heart.

Later that day I sit in a room with his father.
I pity his flat eyes and the shock
of black and silver hair in a halo around his face;
the set of his shoulders, the deep cracks
in his hard hands.

I tell him his son is dead.
I watch his eyes as I do so.
He takes it without blinking.
His stained hands flex.

He tells me it’s a mistake.
Says the boy should not be dead.

Says the boy’s mother is the one
he wanted to stab but wouldn’t
you know it that fucking whore

went and hid behind his boy
and now she’s never going to pay
for her sins is she.











Bio:

Scott K. Odom is a detective for a Sheriff's Department on the Central Coast of California. He uses photographs, found imagery, and digital manipulation in his collage work. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, The New York Quarterly, Pleiades, The Yalobusha Review, and others. He thinks the best thing about being a cop is being an artist. He lives in Cambria with his stunningly gorgeous artist wife and his stunningly teenaged daughter.


Scott's blog: Dishwasher's Tears.

Scott was the featured artist in Mannequin Envy's Winter issue.