MFA VISUAL ART

Onni Estabrook

Onni Estabrook’s ceramics reference the culture of the car, from meandering freeways to steering wheels and tire tracks. These works channel geometric forms, found materials, and signage from the aesthetic world that the car produces. Onni’s mixed media wares are not representations of the car so much as souvenirs from American petro-culture.

Here, the automobile is a technology of the self. From the ritual of the commute to the pilgrimage of the road trip, your ride says something about you. Perhaps because—even as you control it—it does something to you. Moving at rest in your car, you leave your place and keep your identity. On the way to and from work and home, you become who you already are.

This spiritual aspect of cars introduces an ambivalence into Onni’s practice. The artist imbues grids and eternal knots, license plates and corporate logos into glossy and rugged substrates that seem as if a shiny aerodynamic blob were baled with asphalt, concrete, and gravel. This simultaneity of expressive ornamentation and allusion to the systemic reins of state and capital suggests a double bind between freedom and constraint. Belted to the driver’s seat and effectively handcuffed to the wheel, the driver of the automobile is a moved mover. They are shaped by infrastructures that promise freedom and yet script their every move.

Meditating through this predicament, navigating its interchanges, Onni concentrates their own sensoria of gas guzzling Americana into koans made of clay. These ceramic riddles are about you: how you got here, what drives you, and what you drive.

— Ahura Sultan, OSU Department of History of Art, PhD Student

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