Clay Odom’s Flowering Phantasm. Photo courtesy of City of Austin Cultural Arts Division via CultureMap Austin.
Artist and UT Austin professor Clay Odom will represent Austin at UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN)’s collective exhibition of the nine Media Arts Creative Cities opening in France in late April, reports CultureMap Austin.
Austin is the only U.S. city designated as a Media Arts Creative City and Odom’s massive multimedia installation, Flowering Phantasm (created along with his design firm, studioMODO, and fellow Austinite Sean O’Neill), will be exhibited in Data City, the UNESCO show.
“The project is designed to provoke contemplation of the complex relationships between people, space, nature, and technology — as they are and as they can be,” says Odom, “and hopefully produces a sense of wonder and delight in the process.”
The French to English translation of the Data City’s description of the work is also charming:
First, this installation is built as an encounter with a familiar object whose form, height and materials yet remain strange.
This recessed structure is a suggestive medium on which everyone let their imagination flourish. The frame, full of connections, interprets in a sensitive way, what revolves around her, transcribing sound and light of the environment to which it belongs and putting the rudiments of a communication with the outside world.
Congratulations to all involved!
