The Residue of Pondering
- artandcakela
- Jun 25
- 4 min read
"I think of my work as the residue of my pondering," Beryl Odette writes when I ask about her first solo show with Track 16. There's something refreshingly honest about that description. Her exhibition Seaing presents sixteen works that span oil paint to salt, wood to ash, resin to cement—all emerging from what she describes as a lifetime of developing this body of work.
The title combines seeing with the vastness of the ocean "to explore how we see, how we are seeing, how we learned to see the infinite obstacles to fully seeing ourselves and others." It's wordplay that opens up rather than closes down meaning.
Born and based in Los Angeles, descended from survivors of slavery and the Holocaust, Beryl works across multiple media to examine how we perceive each other. The curatorial text by Richelle Munkhoff, Beth Ann Whittaker, and Plain Sight Archive describes her approach as probing "the process of visual apprehension through techniques of layering and accumulation."
Take her Incarnation paintings. They began when Beryl took a painting she wasn't happy with and decided to paint over it, keeping two unusually placed eyes stacked on top of each other. The new portrait had four eyes. This became the image she painted onto multiple canvases, which she then obscured. It's a process that embodies her entire approach—seeing more, then questioning what that additional seeing reveals or conceals.
Her process resists simple categorization. "I don't think in terms of evolving or changing," she explains. "It is a collaboration with the materials in the moment and over time. So, I would say it is more of an emerging." This collaboration means every piece becomes what she calls a "happy accident"—working without a known outcome and being okay with that uncertainty.
The show includes three small chandelier-inspired objects that demonstrate her ongoing exploration with salt, a material she's worked with since the 1990s. For the first time, she's grown salt crystals onto objects and structures. The chandeliers occupy different spaces in the installation—one hovers above a low plinth, another hangs at eye level, a third dangles overhead. "In this way, they asked to be viewed separately, but in concert," she notes.
The curatorial text points out how "as objects of light and opulence, chandeliers both promote the ability to see and demand to be seen." Beryl transforms them through crystallization, changing their relationship with form and light in ways that are "so enchanting, the viewer may not be immediately aware of what becomes hidden or lost."
Working with Track 16's Sean Meredith on selecting and arranging pieces became part of the exploration itself. "Given the themes of my work, collaborating with someone else's seeing helps me to see more," Beryl writes. After the visual busyness of her studio, she found it "such a delight to see the work with space to breathe" in the gallery setting.
Human heads recur throughout her practice as what she calls "dream boxes"—forms that give us space to imagine. The cast heads on view offer possibility while reflecting our learned perceptions. Children appear as another through line, explored through pieces like her carved Eye On baseball bat and Ladder for Girls. The curatorial text notes how we learn to perceive through games, and how "the accumulation of generational experiences including trauma, shape the hidden strata of perception."
Beryl describes being influenced by "walking around in the world being both seen and not seen in complicated ways. There are so many different labels that can be applied to me and rarely are they applied all at once. And never in the arrangement that I would configure myself."
The work uses what the curators describe as beauty as her "favorite hammer"—creating what they call "a soft entrance to a dreamlike depth where one can confront the possibility of seeing and being seen." Beryl's ambitious hope is that viewers leave with a greater sense of their own mind. She aims to create work that's "visually engaging and not didactic. The work is a prelude to conversation, whether that conversation is with ourselves or others."
For ongoing challenges, she cites two constants: "life, and inspiration." Daily life takes more time and energy than she wants, while she finds herself needing to reign in inspiration. "Since I work in a way where I am constantly discovering, I am continuously encountering exciting threads to pull or follow, I must select and not follow every inspiration."
If someone could only see one piece from the show, Beryl recommends Behind the Chandelier, which she says "encapsulates the seeds of my pondering." But with materials this varied—the show includes everything from traditional oil painting to experimental salt crystallization—she notes "there's something for everyone."
The response she's most pleased with? Being told the work is "deeply meaningful without being didactic and that it speaks to our shared humanity." For an artist who states "I'm always beginning a conversation" and wants viewers to encounter the work without explanation, that feedback suggests the work is doing exactly what she intends.
Seaing asks us to slow down and question how we've learned to see and what that seeing might miss. In a world that often demands immediate interpretation, the show offers something different: space to ponder and permission to discover meaning through sustained attention.
Seaing runs through July 19 at Track 16's second location, 706 Heliotrope Dr, Los Angeles.
