Odeta Xheka
About the Artist
Working across painting, collage, and digital media, Odeta Xheka’s story parallels the highs and lows that countless women artists face as they negotiate the demands of daily pressures of the family with the aspiration to make ambitious art that is both sensitive&cerebral. Within an existing culture that likes things to be simple and pigeonholed, Xheka keeps a firm eye on the very thin line that divides sincerity of expression from sheer banality.
As a woman, fated to be narrated rather than the narrator, she makes art to claim her voice because art is the opposite of speechlessness.
The National Gallery of Albania, Annmarie Sculpture Garden, Waterworks Museum, Tifton Museum, Maryland Federation of Art, Brooklyn Art Council, and WoArtBlog are some of the venues that have hosted her work in recent years.
Artist Statement
Drowning Depths – Between Solitude and Loneliness (Home) is a multi-part digital collage series reflecting on who gets to be the subject of the story taking place at home, who matters behind the scene, and who our compassion and interest should be directed at as a matter of both personal and political will. A series of overly familiar domestic scenes are altered to appear disorienting, almost menacing. Devoid of the human presence, they lack warmth despite the bejeweled tones thus issuing an invitation to think carefully about who and how fully one gets to inhabit these spaces making use of the visual imagination to delve into philosophical probing.
What are your “Treasured moments” & how do you connect it to your work?
What does one understand with “life at home” and what are the various coping mechanisms involved especially when it comes to women? Motherhood feels heavy, heavier still is the pressure to conform at the expense of one’s whole personhood not to mention the weight of day-to-day momentous yet banal existence. What about it? What about the work which I often do once the children are tucked in bed? What about my whole being which often gets relegated to unfulfilled potential?
I am hard at work creating other spaces for myself, quietly but resolutely. These other rooms, empty yet pulsating, showcase the desire to cast a searching eye on all the ways that archetypal domestic life strips women, mothers in particular, from the ability to decide for themselves which facet of their multidimensional persona they choose to put in front of the world as worthy for further examination.
