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.

Read More