Known mostly for her unique brand of mixed media on canvas, Odeta Xheka is an artist, writer, poet, and debuting picture book creator.

Her story parallels the highs and lows that countless women artists face, as they negotiate the demands to create and procreate alongside the commandment to create and be self-interestedly individualistic - the clash of daily pressures of the family with the aspiration to make ambitious art.

In recent years, alongside focusing on raising her family, Xheka has worked across painting, collage and digital media aiming to decipher the various ways that a lived reality and an emotional truth can be represented.

Her debuting picture book Here Comes Ingo is IndieReader Approved and Creative Child Magazine's Book of the Year.

Her creative nonfiction can be found at Mutha Magazine, Literary Mama, The Today Show Parenting, and Her View From Home among other online publications.

* Note to Self

Making art can feel like an act of exposure. Don't allow yourself to be restraint by conventional expectations. But also remember that just because it is your own story, that doesn't entitle you to an audience. You have to earn that.

THE WRITING ON THE WALL inhabits that rarified space where the voice of a poet and that of a visual artist combine to provoke, within a culture that likes things to be simple and pigenholed, a desire to impose a story upon the image in order to make a statement and draw out emotion in the perenial search toward a new emotional expressiveness in contemporary art much to the tune of Mark Leckey, Cally Spooner and Ed Atkins who use dense, poetic texts in their videos and performances.

In a quietly ardent way the work wants the viewers to feel as if they are not in front of a photograph but rather walking through a poem, peeping under the layers, squnting in an effort to read the half hidden words, impatiently separating the colors from the text, reassessing the words as truths.

• Visual Influences

Barbara Kruger

Heather Phillipson

THE INEFFABLE CONDITION is a series of highly textured, selectively cropped, half hidden, expressive yet free of precise detailing portraits - forms simplified into flat sections of color - create tension through the truncation of space; they dominate the whole frame, physically touching all sides, pressing close to the picture plane, almost into the viewer's space as if to ask: Can we talk about pain? Do you know how? Are you lost? Lonely? Which inner muscle of your heart is working too hard to compensate for the other muscles of your heart? Are you running on empty? Can you make it? Do you want to ask for help?

• Visual Influences

Chuck Close

Jenny Saville (early period)

TRIANGULAR is a highly textured collage captured in the style of Annegret Soltau's "overstitched and sewn" photographs for whom there is no separation between art, life, and women. Via cutting, ripping, pasting, overlaying different textures and materials, this multifaceted series speaks a hybrid language - remixed, re-contextualized, and wholly build from essential fragments of lived emotional reality.

An exquisitely layered woman, a painted object, a bruised surface, a manipulated photograph photographed from different angles: where does the artwork "reside"? Is this series synonymous with the kitsch of love and desire (in other words, the common use of the word “romantic”) or does it stand for an explicit critique of the kind of attitude that legitimizes the logic of material constraints and power struggles that hold the subject down?

• Visual Influences

Annegret Soltau

Wangechi Mutu

REMAKE/R begins with a kernel - an image turned into a feeling which, in turn, remains permanently frozen into a single moment of rejoicing. Here is the artist operating in her own space and time, expressing herself to herself alone.

Inspired by Hans Arp, one of the most versatile minds of the 20th century, Joan Miro's adaptation of biomorphic forms, and Henry Matisse's approach to collage as a painting, this series of handmade collages explores the potential for unique compositional relationships that result from the unfussy yet harmonious arrangement of organic forms and both figurative and non-representational elements.

• Visual Influences

Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp (Jean Arp)

Twyla Tharp

REMEMBRANCE wonders what it is like to be forced to learn the mechanism of vanishing under the pressure of large public forces and private action, to know how to unbind one's self from the illusion of acknowledgment and recognition, and yet, to hold on to one's own sense of authority especially as it pertains to women in the arts.

In a selection that is personal, recursively self-referential, and fragmentary in the way a poem can be, like little flashes of connection to time and history, it helps bring much-deserved attention to the work of sidelined female artists via a simple, effective, and thoroughly "female" visual language "floating" on Ukiyo-e sensibility and landing on highly textured collaged compositions.

• Visual Influences

Utagawa Hiroshige

Barbara Shaw

THE TALES WE TELL is an on-going series of digital collages digging for visual clues that can unlock yet another layer of understanding in classic fairy tales such as The Emperor's New Clothes, The Princess and the Pea, Goldielocks and the Three Bears, The Little Mermaid, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Cinderella.

• Visual Influences

Dread & Delight: Fairy Tales in an Anxious World traveling exhibition

Conceptual Illustration

Dangling traces the theme of suspension whether formal or psychological not through the narrow prism of the self but through a wide-angle lens that exposes the chain of associations, often subliminal and emotionally charged, of womanhood as female, body, emotion, soft, low, flesh, nature.

The very physicality of the shapely legs – their sensuality and weight – is offset by the seemingly effortless, floating state in which they are presented. Eschewing a firm base they are positioned in dialogue with the surrounding environment and, by extension, the viewer. The implied vulnerability - they look as if they have been assembled by a machine from off-the-peg, standardized parts - adds yet another layer to understanding the exposed and defenseless state of female representation especially when it comes to the often subtle and coded role of images in creating new knowledge.

• Visual Influences

Paul Cézanne's Bathers

Louise Bourgeois's Suspension (exhibition of hanging works)

Kids Fun Factory

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