Odia Reimer is a textile installation artist from Winnipeg Manitoba, currently living in Altona Manitoba. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Manitoba and is a member of the Theotrinsic Art Group. Odia was the founding curator of the Gallery in the Park, a small town gallery in Altona Manitoba which has been named one of the top ten galleries to visit in Manitoba. Odia was also part of the selection committee in procuring permanent pieces for the three-acre sculpture garden. Over eight years she curated shows of some notable artists, such as Tom Lovatt and Bette Woodland, Grace Nickel, Ray Dirks, Cliff Derksen, Inuit Collection from the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and Peter Sawatzky. Odia initiated a series of art talks to feature the work exhibited in the gallery, including Patricia E. Bovey as Director Emeritus of the Winnipeg Art Gallery.
Odia is known for her patience in producing large, monochromatic, simple but profound, fibre installation pieces that carry a multi-layered message of her own story and experiences. She uses repetition of form to express the repetitive nature of the universal longing, to be healthy and whole. She believes that this haunting distress of nothingness manifests itself in the symbols of the mundane ordinary events of life. Often unnoticed and unknown to everyone else, these images, which by their very nature are private and un-noteworthy, are playing out again and again in daily life, wearing the spirit thin. Odia’s art brings to life these moments with hopes that an artistic representation of this stream of repetitive images will validate the tyranny of the symbols of routine, the constant reminder of longings unfulfilled.
Odia has shown her work in many of the Manitoba art galleries.
She was awarded a grant from the Manitoba Craft Council for the installation piece The Hem of His Garment, shown for the first time at the Frame Art Gallery, 2015. Her work, Evidence of a Trial was captured on the cover page of the Working Together, Winnipeg Foundation Magazine, 2012. She was also featured in a documentary by Shaw TV.
