We're Here!
Sara Jean Odam
We’re Here!
Available Space Art Projects
Las Vegas, NV
August 20 – 30, 2023
Sara Jean Odam is a painter inspired by performance. Her bright, playful, direct paintings are portraits mostly of clowns in costumes and environments that are born out of a unique collaboration between painter and performer. She works from life, with modeling sessions full of joy, comparing notes on artistic concerns, laughs, deep talks, and sharing music, time and space. Armed with a palette of vivid colors, she relishes in painting textures like fur, skin, eyelashes, satin, sequins, stripes, tulle, and glitter to play with the visual language of performance and question the gaze of the viewer, sitter, and painter through the old school world of figurative painting. She leans into vulnerability and awkwardness as a way to generate empathy for our aging bodies, sexual needs and gender expectations. Operating from a place of love for painting and people, Odam searches for humor and opportunities to playfully wrestle with the dark and scary parts of life.
The title for the exhibition is in part inspired by the HBO drag queen makeover docuseries of the same name that follows three drag queens as they journey across small-town America, recruiting local residents to share their stories and put on a one-night-only drag show in their community. Watching this show throughout a dark period
during the pandemic, she was moved by stories of resilience, love, and acceptance (in the face of much hostility) and how drag can be a powerful means to transform grief and create connection. “We’re Here!” celebrates visibility, the act of seeing and being
seen.