Onyx Odyssey is a journey into blackness and all its complexities as navigated by artist Jefferson Pinder. On a literal level, blackness is a color property experienced through sight resulting from the absence of light, prompting the inability to see. In cultural discourse, blackness is a state of being constructed by an exponential variety of experiences that make up a person’s character in relation to the color of his or her skin. Scholar Rone Shavers explains “’blackness’ is a specific set of cultural and social tropes that mark and define an ethnic or racial identity and implies a shared notion of historical, social, and cultural traditions.”1 Both the scientific and the socially-constructed definitions of blackness inform the hauntingly mysterious and powerful work of interdisciplinary artist Jefferson Pinder.

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The shape of this object is the exact dimensions of Stanley Kubrick’s Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  A symbol of unseen intelligence in the movie, the monolith is a mystery. The cryptic object was used to instruct intelligent life form and was deep black. Kubrick mentioned in an interview that he didn’t want the Monolith to be an, “Advanced television teaching machine…”. Indeed, it was seen as an otherworldly spiritual object that contained a wealth of knowledge. All the monoliths are black, extremely flat, non-reflective rectangular solids whose dimensions are in the precise ratio of 1: 4: 9 (the squares of the first three positive integers). These dimensions are the main source of debate about the simple external design of the monoliths. It is suggested in the novel 2001 that this number series does not stop at three dimensions. 

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