Last summer, Galen Odell-Smedley opened a solo show, “Peach Peach,” at Humboldt Park’s Ignition Project Space. The exhibition hinted at a meticulously arranged artist’s woodshop: What we normally consider raw material, waste material, and tools came to the foreground in intricate attire and partied with other elaborate kinetic sculptures.
It was hard to define what purpose each object served in a sprawling installation where there was no distinguishing art from artifact. Many items were functional, like the state-of-the-art table that majestically sat in the middle of the space, with its irregular, multicolored top composed of chunks of white ash still reminiscent of their tree form; its surface showed burrows scarred by the emerald ash borer, the notorious beetle threatening the existence of white ash in North America—and the future of baseball bats. Other objects exchanged inside jokes with the artist. Untitled (Bending Forms) were, quite literally, bending forms that would be woodworking jigs in another context. But, in that time and space, they chilled by the wall as artwork.
Galen Odell-Smedley
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When I reached out to Odell-Smedley for this column, I said I was interested in his blurring the line between art and craft. “This boundary-emphasizing idea always strikes me as odd,” he says when we met, “because it’s not a conversation that I was aware of when I started to pursue a practice that would seem to align with art and craft. I didn’t realize that these approaches might be viewed as distinct in the first place, and I don’t find it particularly useful to separate them now.”
Since he entered SAIC’s MFA sculpture program in 2016, Odell-Smedley has produced a body of work conceptually astute and impeccably fabricated. Studio practice for Odell-Smedley is an active process of learning and understanding the fundamental materials and the long craft histories behind them. This continued journey of learning and making has transformed his view of what art is and what its social roles are: that we should shift the focus away from the commodified or presentable product, which we call artwork, to its networked process of becoming, which relies on social participation and natural resources. To think of art socially and ecologically is to flatten the hierarchies that exist in our preconceptions.
Courtesy the artist
Growing up in a family of musicians, Odell-Smedley had access to musical instruments; he studied jazz trumpet through college. His attentiveness to sound extends beyond music to his studio. In “Peach Peach,” on the ash table, there was a foil-covered beaker sitting on a homemade magnetic stirrer. The stirrer was mixing shellac and emitting a warm and comforting white noise. “I’ve been trying to address sound and listening much more in my practice, both in terms of literally making sound works and trying to understand material processes through the sounds they produce,” he says. He told me that certain wood would make a particular sound when cut by a very sharp blade. To attune oneself to the material at hand is to understand how to interpret the pitch and timbre of the vibrations, as though learning an intimate language spoken between metal and wood. For Odell-Smedley, auditory sensing is itself an accurate and efficient way of measuring, a process that embodies a kind of knowledge that resists verbalization or quantitative analysis.
But his exploration of the senses through sculpture doesn’t end at sound; there is also a vast olfactory landscape. “African Mahogany can give off a fresh and pungent smell with notes of cinnamon and allspice, that is if you cut it slowly with a handsaw,” he says. “If you use a machine, the heat turns the fragrance into a burnt, toasted spice version.”
Having worked as a bartender and trained in wine tasting, he has come to understand that the different “professions” he has worked are but parts of one big continuum. “Even when I was bartending, I approached ingredients and process with the same attentiveness that I bring to my studio practice,” he says. This is reflected in his performance Revolutions, Interchanges, Markers, the first iteration of which took place at Links Hall in 2017. He wore a white shirt, with sleeves rolled up, and a black tie, and he sat at a potter’s wheel behind a long cocktail bar and served participants clay wares; the various shapes and forms—and sometimes unexpected characteristics—were a result of the conversation he had with the participant while making what he called “empathetic clay objects.” The performance is less about materializing presence or intimacy than pointing to undefined factors that, to our unawareness, tie us to a greater network of things. They affect us—our bodies—in ways more complex than what we tend to stiffly describe as causality. Odell-Smedley’s performance highlights this complexity by transferring more autonomy to the body; the body makes decisions, with or despite the mind.
Courtesy the artist
Last summer, when I visited his solo exhibition, what was supposed to be a walk-through with the artist grew into an explosively informative master class on wood literacy and appreciation. For the base of the sculpture Untitled (Breather), (which is also humorously a doorbell), the artist sliced up a piece of white ash lumber, spread the slices out like a deck of cards, and glued them together. The pattern of the tree rings thus repeats across the surface. The science of dendrochronology, which has helped scientists and historians date historic events, is poetically alluded to as Odell-Smedley lays bare the beauty of the wood grain and lets us consider how it can speak as an archive that stores histories of its environ.
Given his proximity to wood and wood production, Odell-Smedley’s interest in sustainable forestry isn’t far-fetched. It isn’t sustainability, as he would correct me, but regeneration that we should delve into. As of 2021, about 13 percent of the deforestation worldwide was caused by logging, as opposed to 41 percent by beef production. “If you harvest the forest with a plan for it to regenerate, the forest has the potential to take care of itself much more effectively than humans replanting trees,” he says. And more resiliently too, as confirmed by essayist Claire Cameron in a NYT opinion piece that notes that artificial replanting of an arboreal monoculture puts the forest more at risk of wildfire.
Today, Odell-Smedley works full-time building furniture and teaching ceramics and printmaking at the Hyde Park Art Center. Building science is his latest fascination, as he is renovating his newly purchased 140-year-old home. “It’s really interesting to recognize that you’re one of many people who have taken care of—or not taken care of—this building,” he says. “I do feel like I’m engaged in a larger artwork whose timeline spans much more than a single human lifetime.”