128: JAYME ODGERS AND APRIL GREIMAN, Wet Magazine comprehensive collection (three works) < Jayme Odgers, Over and Out., 24 January 2023 < Auctions

For me, the piece [April Greiman and I] did for WET Magazine, a publication that epitomized West Coast lifestyle at that time, represents our quintessential California Design look. It’s a strange salmagundi of disparate elements and styles, definitely irreverent, oh so colorful, with our requisite Japanese overtones, especially the gradation with which I was obsessed, and a quasi-religious subtext.

—Jayme Odgers, interviewed by Steven Heller for Print

Visual Energy

Jayme Odgers & April Greiman

Jayme Odgers, Portrait of April Greiman (1986)

The synergetic partnership of Jayme Odgers and April Greiman yielded results that helped defined an era of West Coast design and aesthetics. The pair collaborated on many commissions, including for the Olympics, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and Peter Shire, and created original works, most well-known of which are likely their laminated Spacemats. While both artists trained with revered designers — Odgers with Paul Rand and April Greiman with Armin Hofman — their collaborations would birth something new, explosive, and entirely of their moment.

Recognized as one of the earliest graphic designers to embrace emerging digital technologies, Greiman met Odgers when, in 1976, she moved to Los Angeles from New York, where she had worked as a freelance designer for the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1977, the pair worked together on a brochure for CalArts, and, five years later, Greiman became head of the institute's design department — which she successfully renamed as Visual Communications.

Formally, Odgers and Greiman established and worked as the firm Visual Energy for three years. Asked by Steven Heller to describe their style and approach, Odgers said, "[April and I] certainly didn’t verbalize any particular aesthetic beyond 'blendo.' No theorizing, for sure. If anything it was the opposite— a sense of freedom without rules, without structure or theory. April studied Swiss Design under Armin Hofman in Basel, me under Rand; perhaps it was our desire to break out of that highly structured approach—to be loose, free, anarchic, subversive, against the norm, but with West Coast colors..."

Once we got together, April and I made a great team—she was style-based, I was content-based. She was typographic-based, I was image-based. She is right-handed, I’m left...She is female and I am male. The reason I feel this is important is that each piece we did together carried male/female qualities which appealed to the widest possible audience.

Jayme Odgers

Seeing and Being

The Expansive Visions of Jayme Odgers

by Marian Lawrence

Jayme Odgers was a transformative, visionary artist whose work constantly pushed boundaries and defined a generation. Over the arc of his life as a graphic designer and artist, he continually reinvented his engagement with content, form, and style, perpetually redefining how one might see the world. Odgers’s body of work spans the strict constructs of Modernist graphics, the pre-digital experimental photographic collaging known as photo-design, the structured chaos of the Pacific Wave movement that he pioneered, and the introspective personal work that represented his relentless pursuit of spiritual growth and intellectual challenge. This collection offers a survey of Odgers’s expansive career, showcasing the development, range, and depth he possessed as a true original, an incredible polymath, a great communicator, and groundbreaking artist.

Early in his career, Odgers displayed an aptitude for Modernist design: in his work with the legendary Paul Rand in the 1960s (and later, his own commercial practice), Odgers brilliantly employed the rigid principles of modernism to create award-winning corporate identity materials — indeed it was his early wayfinding signage for IBM that attracted Rand as an employer and mentor. Odgers brought a sophisticated, lively viewpoint and exceptional technical skills to these commissions, becoming quite successful over the span of thirteen years.

“Having only a camera I made photographs night and day…Finally I was just being; and that is when I started to see."

Eventually Odgers tired of working within the constraints of his trade, and, in 1973, dropped out of the commercial world to embark on a personal voyage of self-discovery. For the next several years he traveled “mentally and physically,” concluding with a three-month stint spent camping alone in the southwestern desert. This experience, combined with his embrace of Buddhism, dramatically changed Odgers’s life and art: “I breathed light and space,” he said, “Having only a camera I made photographs night and day…Finally I was just being; and that is when I started to see."

Jayme Odgers, from the *Desert Handbook Series*, 1980

The photos that resulted from this retreat became his Desert Handbook series, which Odgers referred to as self-portraits. These striking images formed the basis for what would become his next artistic chapter: combining graphic design, typography, photography, illustration, and collage, his work began to defy categorization. By adding what he called “archeological layering,” Odgers could change the meaning of his photographs. Long before Photoshop, Odgers used his talent and ingenuity to create an arsenal of cutting-edge techniques in a painstaking process of manipulating images to realize his vision: compositions that made viewers question what they saw. Traces of Odgers’s process are visible in many of the comprehensives (or comps) offered in this collection, working layouts used by designer and client during the design process.

Long before Photoshop, Odgers used his talent and ingenuity to create an arsenal of cutting-edge techniques in a painstaking process of manipulating images to realize his vision: compositions that made viewers question what they saw.

This major shift became the launching point for Odgers’s seminal role in establishing what became known as the Pacific Wave (California New Wave) movement. In its radical break from modernism, his work became free-flowing and unstructured, exploding with colorful, playful exuberance. Working independently and in collaboration with April Greiman, Odgers blurred the distinction between commercial and fine art, creating what became the quintessential California design statement of the late 1970s and early 80s.

At the height of his second career, Odgers received many exciting commissions from a diverse roster of clients, among them the 1984 Olympics, Super Bowl XXI, the Toronto International Film Festival, Herman Miller, Architectural Pottery/Group Artec, Arts + Architecture, Life, Rolling Stone and Wet magazines, ABC Records, Fleetwood Mac, Johnny Rivers, and The Crusaders. Meanwhile, the Pacific Wave style had become ubiquitous and widely copied, and thus Odgers decided again to switch paths. Compelled to find out what he would create if left to his own devices without a client’s agenda, he continued to pursue his central question: “Who am I?”

Odgers embarked on creating a series of “photo paintings,” such as Seven Levels (above), using large-format photographs, paint, dyes, and collage to create a kind of multi-dimensional hyper-reality. He then abandoned the camera to begin abstract forms and Cubism on canvas, wood, and paper. Subsequently, he reconnected with his love of typography, creating his Prototype series to explore words-as-images, wordplay, and alternative meanings. In choosing which words to use as his subject, Odgers often drew on Buddhist tenets of presence: “Be-Here-Now” became his mantra and point of departure. Other original works portray humble artists tools as fellow beings, as in the whimsical World of Pencilvania and the richly imagined Paint Tube People series. And, of course, he continued his practice of self-portraiture.

Odgers spent his lifetime discovering and rediscovering that making art was the closest he could come to being his true self, a process that could provide the pure experience of “just being.” His fearless disregard for disciplinary boundaries allowed him to see in new ways, an ever-expanding and expansive vision that he continuously transmitted to the world. Fortunately, we can still receive these transmissions through his work and influence even if, as he stated in an early signature phrase, Odgers is Over and Out.

I feel my better works are infused with a metaphysical space as well as an illusion of physical space – infinite space at best. At that point they come “tantras” of a sort; images that allow one’s mind to expand out-wardly to the edges of one’s known universe. When meditated upon one can hopefully “hear” the universe and sense the pulse. When I’m hot, and I’m cooking, that’s the soup I’m after. Celestial soup.

Jayme Odgers