re.riddle

 odonchimeg davaadorj: sound of sun

January 21, 2025 - February 22, 2025

Opening Reception: Tuesday, January 21st from 5-8pm

Gallery Hours: Tues - Sat 11am - 5pm
Minnesota Street Project, Room 204
1275 Minnesota St., San Francisco

re.riddle is pleased to present Sound of Sun, a solo exhibition of work by Odonchimeg Davaadorj. The opening reception is on Tuesday, January 21 from 5-8pm. The exhibition runs through February 22, 2025.

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

The surreal universes depicted in Odonchimeg Davaadorj’s ink paintings reveal a complex mythology invented by the artist, inhabited by uncanny chimeras, and situated between folk art and speculative fiction. In Sound of Sun, Davaadorj’s second solo exhibition with re.riddle, the artist evokes a kind of synesthesia, conjuring the sun as the genesis of all beings, the essence of aliveness. She ponders, what are the edges of a sun’s whisper? Might the sun’s striated tones of warmth resemble a cackle or a thrum? 

Inspired by her Mongolian culture’s centering of the sun as the source of all life, Davaadorj’s paintings explore the visual and metaphoric sound of the sun, echoing its omnipotent presence and rhythmic, directional movements that inform and calibrate all earthly activities. She observes that the sun’s energy activates earthly senses, waking life through light, heat, and energetic vibrations, the umbilicus between the earth and the sky. 

Davaadorj’s recent body of work is composed entirely in sanguine shades of red, symbolizing the body’s interior systems, those that sustain us and which connect us to each other. Her images intertwine twisting branches and tree roots reminiscent of arteries with motifs symbolizing life cycles and ancestral lineages, death as a return to the earth, and stages of renewal—a tentacular ecology born of cross-species interdependence. This essence connects the earth with the body, grounding both in the sensorialness of life itself, the sensuality of flesh, and to the visible and invisible threads, the bloodlines and cellular strands weaving all of existence together in the weighted corporeality of aliveness. 

Philosopher Donna Haraway termed this coexistence “making kin,” which she believed “to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.” Embedded in each of the artist’s vignettes are visual allegories that allude to autopoiesis, systems comprised of many interlocking elements that can regenerate themselves in eternal cycles of divine emergence. In the Sound of Sun, Davaadorj’s pictures offer portals to these overlapping interior and exterior landscapes, where life finds meaning through a kinship encompassing all beings living under the sun, awakened each day by the ambient and dissonant pulse of aliveness.

Artworks

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