Shaun O'Dell

PROOF essay by Grace Earick
Shaun O’Dell: Cartophantasms from the Tongues Above

For decades, artist Shaun O’Dell has created drawings, videos, music, and prints that explore the intertwining realities of human and natural orders, foregrounding the destructive legacies of manifest destiny. Working within a hieroglyphic lexicon of abstract and figurative marks, O’Dell investigates the colonial histories of his ancestors and their contemporaries to reveal the imperial roots of modern-day ecological change. In his second collaboration with Island Press, titled Cartophantasms from the Tongues Above, O’Dell forensically catalogs the relics of a pre-colonial North America, mining the lost narratives that haunt these trodden lands.

The project has roots in 2018, when two events coalesced to ground O’Dell’s conceptual investigations with concrete realities. First, the burning of his hometown, Paradise, California in The Camp Fire, the largest and deadliest wildfire in California history. Second, that same year, O’Dell began a series of visits to the Cumberland Plateau where his paternal ancestors started their respective journeys west through the Kentucky wilderness on trails carved out by Daniel Boone in the 18th century. The personal immediacy of these events – one visceral, the other meditative – crystalized the artist’s own entanglement with the environmental and colonial themes of his practice. While processing the loss of life and habitat in the Sierra Nevada where the artist grew up, O’Dell laid the groundwork for the investigative iconography seen in Cartophantasms from the Tongues Above.

Two prints, Parataxonomoonelegy and Cocklebur Resonance, prominently feature indigenous flora and fauna of the Cumberland Plateau region, specifically highlighting the Carolina parakeet and cocklebur plant. The ghostly profile of a European colonizer in a coonskin hat is illuminated by a burning wick in Cold Candle. The outlines of stray faces and limbs are charted on a folded green map in Urpflanze Gist, while a floating hand presents the cryptic text: “E.1GOT HEAR RICHLED TOOK THE PARAKEET.” The project references Christopher Gist, a surveyor who was hired by land speculators under The Ohio Company in 1750 to map out areas of present-day Kentucky. Cartography has always been a lethal tool available to those commodifying indigenous land, allowing settlers to advertise a region as ‘uninhabited’ and ripe for ‘development.’ O’Dell’s formal processes – precise linework and flat, diagrammatic forms –cleverly mimic mapmaking and taxonomy to underscore this significance. These lands, which were already populated by Native Americans, would be seized and sold to other European settlers under the guise of westward expansion. Go West, so say the Tongues Above. Go West.

Together, the prints illustrate a more specific anecdote: the double-edged story of Gist and his pet parakeet, one of the many mentions in his expedition journal, Tour Through Ohio and Kentucky in 1751. For many passages, Gist lists resources he perceives as profitable, identifying walnuts, rye, cherries, chestnuts, turkey, elk, bear, deer, buffalo, coal, etc. In others, he writes more crudely of his wasteful domination over these lifeforms: “killed two bear. ate tongues” and “killed a bison. took tongue.” Yet in the same text he tenderly mourns the death of his companion parakeet. Noisy and collectivist by nature, Carolina parakeets would move in swaths eating invasive cockleburs and fruits. Perceived as crop-eating pests, they were hunted en masse by colonial farmers. In response, the birds would flock and grieve their fallen companions, making the lingering mourners easy targets for the farmers’ next shot. As a result, the Carolina parakeet, the only parakeet indigenous to North America, would be totally extinct by the 1920s, 170 years after Gist’s survey.

The Carolina parakeet is just one of many specters that haunt North America. The twisted contradictions of its fate highlighted by Gist’s journal encapsulate a certain blindness once described by environmentalist Wendell Berry: “Seldom have [colonizers] looked beyond the enclosure of [their] preconception…Blind to where they were, it was inevitable that they should become the destroyers of what was there.” Yet, where there is an ailing blindness, there too must exist a healing sight. In memoriam to all that was destroyed – people, lands, animals, ecologies – Shaun O’Dell offers Cartophantasms from the Tongues Above for what lingers in the wake: an ode to phantoms, a beacon of vision renewed.