Aimee Odum’s “Searching for Stardust” at Ogden Contemporary Arts. Image by Geoff Wichert.

“Doomscroller invites viewers to reflect on whether our compulsion to engage with constant data streams is a survival strategy or a path to self-destruction.”

These words, which conclude the introduction to Doomscroller, an exhibition currently at Ogden Contemporary Arts, posit an intriguing dilemma. The audience will likely identify with the first option, thinking how important it’s become for us to have our electronics at hand when empty moments loom. We have never been so alone, and whether the cause or the cure, most of us depend on our devices without shame or regret. Climb aboard TRAX, or for that matter attend a wedding, and quite likely everyone seen who is lacking a specific task to keep them busy will be tête-à-tête with a cell phone. So it sounds more like a survival strategy than a path to self-destruction. But how does artist Aimee Odum feel about this? Doesn’t her title, DOOM-scroller, suggest less impartiality than the text implies?

To be sure, there’s superb work present here: for instance, “Searching for Stardust,” comprising nearly a hundred glazed ceramic fragments individually placed on the wall like a celestial explosion frozen in time or the visible convolutions of a coral disappearing into an opaque, rising sea. From the largest to the smallest part, each individual shape relates to those around it. Then there are several videos running on screens nearby, which have prompted critical comments (elsewhere) on the unlikeliness of an artist combining clay, the oldest and yet still most durable medium of human self-expression, with luminous photoelectric patterns responding instantaneously to abstract digital formulas running on circuit boards too tiny to see.

Aimee Odum’s DOOMSCROLLER at Ogden Contemporary Arts. Image by Geoff Wichert.

The questions that concern Odum in Doomscroller have to do with the ever-evolving relationship between us and our technology. One of the earliest assumptions about tech to fail decisively was the whole notion of progress, a hotly debated topic for eons that may finally have been decisively answered. While not every intended advance fails, neither is any an unmitigated success. Fire, the greatest human advance, is the signature example—just ask the people of Maui or Los Angeles.

For Odum, particular questions have to do with the much-debated future of Artificial Intelligence. She was among the first artists to embrace AI, and being an artist, her optimism makes a certain sense. The very traits that bedevil lawyers and their peers—like the tendency of AI programs to make stuff up when the standard answers don’t suffice—could well make it the closest a machine can come to real creativity. Not for nothing do they call it “hallucination.”

Three works from DOOMSCROLLER. Image by Geoff Wichert.

There’s a structural challenge in Doomscroller that’s not characteristic of OCA. In one spot, two works are identified on the same placard, in another it’s ten, and there is simply no way to connect the specific work with an individual title. Typographical elements argue that this is Odum’s preference, not OCA’s. The result is that with a few exceptions, it’s not possible to definitively match the art with the titles. That said, this is not the first time this has happened in a Utah venue. My sense is that, once the Surrealists were done deciding the purpose and meaning of spontaneous works only after they had dreamed them up, and after half a century of increasingly loose and playful art, or works that served the artist but didn’t cry out for conventional titles, many working artists have lost faith or interest in hinting at a work’s meaning, or whatever it may be that titles do for others. Even though my academic colleagues would bristle at this, I think we should prepare ourselves for a percentage of art that will be untitled—and that does not mean labeled with that most annoying label of all: “Untitled.”

We should especially realize that in Ai, shapes, images, and effects will probably have begun with things scraped from anonymous sources, then chosen for the rich or entertaining suggestions they make, rather than a conventionally preconceived intention on the artist’s part. So if a title is needed to identify this or that work, why shouldn’t that title benefit from the same freedom? Odum’s list of titles might then be read as suggestions, from which viewers can choose the one that seems to fit best. As a Surrealist might have asked, the picture in your head should mean more to you than the one on the wall, so why don’t you give it a title?

Aimee Odum, “Infinity Loop.” Image by Geoff Wichert.

Of course, not every artwork can be liberated from its maker’s intentions. Clearly, freedom means a lot to Odum, who spends much of her time outdoors, hiking with her dogs, and refers frequently to nature, even if the reference doesn’t always make it into a work’s final form. In the largest and probably most challenging work in the gallery, “Infinity Loop,” the lower half of an endless tube seems very much to partake of the Earth, even of soil, while the upper half is manmade and, in this installation, seems to yearn to be united with the gallery’s environmental duct work overhead. In such a continuous loop, the journey from biology to technology, from Nature to the Space Age, is not a one-way trip. Contrary to those who think we can abandon our natural origins, thereby escaping ourselves and our self-made fate by fleeing to Mars, we take ourselves along wherever we go. If that’s a problem for some, it’s also a source of joy for Aimee Odum, who daily walks will always bring her back, with her companions, to home and studio.

Aimee Odum: Doomscroller, Ogden Contemporary Arts, Ogden, through April 13

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.