About the Exhibition
Continental Breakfast
May – August 2024
Continental Breakfast includes works featuring Betsy Odom’s unique blending of athletics, leisure, and traditional craft practices such as tooled leather and woodworking. Their self-described “Butchcraft” is both a subversive and humorous queering of everyday objects.
Artist Statement
My work explores the connection between objects and displays of identity. I work with specific materials like tooled leather, sporty fabrics, cork, graphite, thick silver, and airbrushed paints. These materials signify the cultural phenomena that have surrounded my own development: Southern culture, women’s athletics, tomboys, hobbyists, fantasy, or camp. The aesthetics of these groups, although rooted in functionality, often serve to reinforce embedded messages about gender, class, race, and sexuality. I attempt to use a combination of earnest craftsmanship and humor to extract and subvert these messages, creating objects that entertain a fantasy of moving freely among social groups and confronting the contradictions therein.
I use the term “Butchcraft” to describe my practice: my work is an examination of the ways craft and material produces meaning, both through the act of making and in the experience of the materials and objects. I am particularly interested in the cultural connotations attached to craft- I often explore how ideas of gender, androgyny, and facility come together in the ways we make objects. The phrase “butchcraft,” a play on both “bush craft” and “witch craft,” is meant to evoke the spirit of the butch lesbian, who denounces stereotypical femininity through camp displays of macho skills like fixing cars, using power tools, or riding motorcycles. I use craft-based processes as a way of revealing the discursive messages embedded in the materials and objects around us.
I employ a variety of techniques to create my work; I use skills ranging from leather tooling to woodworking, ceramics to airbrushing, sewing to metalworking. Although I often subvert these traditional processes, I try to stay true to the original crafts I reference. I fully engage in the “hubris” of making, examining the ways a well-crafted object can point to a larger sense of pride, value, and identity. I direct my own “pride in making” towards the creation of specific objects with symbolic, romantic, and humorous meanings.
Betsy Odom (b. Amory, Mississippi, 1980) is an artist, curator, and educator based in Chicago. They received their MFA from Yale University School of Art and their BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. They have exhibited internationally in group- and solo- exhibitions, including solo exhibitions at the DePaul Art Museum, 4WPS, ThreeWalls Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, and WomanMade Gallery. They have also exhibited at venues such as Gallery 400, LVL3 Gallery, Journal Gallery in Brooklyn, Corbett vs. Dempsey and Western Exhibitions in Chicago, Amel Bourorina Gallery in Berlin, and Barry Whistler Gallery in Dallas, TX. Odom has been the recipient of several fellowships including an Illinois Arts Council Grant, a Chances Dances Critical Fierceness prize, and two grants from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. Their work is part of the West Collection, the Cleve Carney Museum collection, and the collection of the DePaul Museum of Art.
