Odeta Xheka
Odeta Xheka’s studio lies in Tampa, Florida.
“Our bodies contain stories, songs and wounds that come alive with every breath. To make the body the sole focus of a creative act bent on writing the stories, singing the songs and soothing the wounds all at once is a radical act. It requires unflinching bravery in rejecting bland assent, shame, and internal prejudices. It requires a willingness to embrace more that what is normally acceptable to say under the throws of external forces that rely on unquestioned compliance. So, when I am piecing together each mixed collage - labor-intensive visual narratives wrapped around heart-piercing verses by the likes of Richard Siken, Mey Swenson, Christine Sloan Stoddard, Jericho Brown, Ocean Vuong, and Nina MacLaughlin - the route I take depends on what I want the viewer to walk away feeling given that can never be a static perspective of the body: the shame of its namelessness or its absolute wonder, the nakedness of the skin or the vested interests of the status quo, the body’s needs or its bruising, the warfare against and within itself. The source material for these mixed media pieces is a mixture of pre-cut figurative shapes, lace, sand, and re-appropriations of my own work allowing for the employment of past patters and marks to represent the fact that one can, and must, break from old beliefs and outdated mindset in order to dissemble constructs of the past in an effort to build a future that accommodates shifting ideologies around what it means to inhabit a body.”, Odeta shares.