For the past seven years the artist Jason Oddy has been travelling the world documenting extraordinary places. From Soviet sanatoria on the Ukraine’s Black Sea coast to the United Nations headquarters in Geneva and New York, he has photographed buildings that stand for ideas that reach far beyond the confines of their walls.
His arresting large-scale images treat architectural space as a cultural artefact, one which not only reflects but also seeks to create historical reality. Much of this show focuses on places that are concrete manifestations of a will to power. But whether his pictures are of the Pentagon or of Guantanamo Bay or of cryonics facilities in America or of a car museum in Wolfsburg, Germany, they invariably point to an underlying structure which if nowhere exactly evident is certainly everywhere present.
Oddy’s painstaking, contemplative approach asks us to consider the latent agendas at work in all the places he photographs. His use of a large-format camera and exposures that sometimes last minutes, makes time a component of his pictures too. And as the ragged edges evident in even these most carefully planned utopias show, time is also inexorably at work in the man-made world, slowly undoing every attempt we make to systematise our surroundings.
Born in England in 1967, Jason Oddy currently lives and works in London. His work has been published and exhibited extensively in the United Kingdom, Europe and the USA. It is included in many private and corporate collections, including Channel Four, London, the Wellcome Foundation, Citigroup (formerly Citibank) and DZ Bank.
All work is available for purchase.