Conor O'Brien

Published: A collection of my work included in the Hijacked publication, Germany & Australia

Install views: There Stands The Glass at Black&Blue Gallery, Sydney, 2008

Catalogue Essay:

Conor O’Brien, There Stands The Glass at Black&Blue Gallery, 2008
By Robert Cook

Up trees and not up trees

I can’t figure out Conor’s stuff. Maybe that’s why I like it. In fact, I’m sure it is. And, yeah, that’s the point I conclude this thing on if you want to go ahead and just skip to the end. Before I get to the mystery or whatever, though, there’re a few levels at which I do get what Conor does in a simple, straightforward way. For one, he’s a plain great editor of his own work (and that of others’). I mean, when you look at his shows and his books you never see just one image. It’s always the case that he’s placing one photo against another photo against another photo. The contrasts, when he does this, are sharp but not too jarring. One way of thinking about it is that he’s making a really slo-mo movie, compiling or slicing the jump-cuts but the cuts don’t so much jump as linger and hang over and cast this ambient atmospheric haze or something. And what’s foremost, or at least really important, is that with these cuts or slices, well everything actually, feels chosen, selected, pulled from a million other shots, or potential shots. They seem necessary, right, inevitable. That’s kinda vital. It’s so easy to take a photo and so hard to take a good one. So the very deliberate nature of them, where they all feel right, yet still tense and meaningful, shouldn’t be glossed over. It shouldn’t be taken as a given. Maybe it’s labouring the point but I want to stress, I suppose, that the individual pics and the total look like his own authored thing. That’s important too cause hell it’d be so damned easy to come off as a Tillmans (if that’s how you spell his name) clone, you know, or yet another clone of a clone of a clone. But in Conor’s work what we see, what we feel, is a voice, a pictorial style and speech, that carries with it the tone of him, and the tone of his vision. You know what I mean. It’s impressive to me that Conor had this down from the get-go. It was in the first show I saw of his, Where the heart is… - in Perth, in a crummy little space where I have seen two other amazing shows (one being this deal Conor curated, the other by my friend Alin Huma, an equally brilliant photo editor) – and has been in everything else he’s done. And on that, there’s been a lot of everything else. He’s busy. It’s like there’s been show after show. His name’s around. But, yeah, back to the beginning, as much as it is (his name being around), and as much as I completely get the formal nuances of the work, I still find the shots and layouts surprising and puzzling and hard to get my head around or at least hard to find sound and not-really-stupid words to describe. It’s made harder by my vibe on the guy. See, the thing is, I’ve met Conor a few times, and he comes off as so calm and centred. He’s got a beard. He’s got a strong, solid physical presence, despite not being super tall, just more or less medium height I suppose. He’s also a skateboarder. And I knew about that, and how he used to be in some skate shots in mags and stuff ages ago, but it shocked me at an opening in Melbourne last year when he said he had skated there. I expressed some kind of dorky surprise and he said that his skateboard was just kinda an extension of him now since he’d been skating so long. Yet again his sense of calm surprised me. He wore a striped shirt! And so, the cliche of the dumb-arsed skater scene with its Thrasher mag trash image seem a million miles from where Conor’s at as a human being. But in his shots, there seems to be this push and pull between chaos and disorder (that seems to stem from the street scene maybe, though I could be wrong since I’m too old to know how these things operate anymore) and a deep, rich calm. So that’s the thing that I find it hard to kinda get. In his work, there are young people all over the place, having fun, falling over, up trees, pissing in the river, riding motorbikes and pushies too. And then there are young people in repose, soulful, rested, swimming in the river. And then there are trees with no one at all up them, and lawns, and empty galleries, and white walls. And these are so quiet and soft and subdued. But they are also strong pictures. They are spaces not for meditation or anything like that, but spaces of passage, of the gentle post-night drift home, of the slow wake-up, of the end-of-the-trip, of a heavy-lidded glance. Whatever, I think what I want to say is that they are peopled, even when there is no person in them. They’re inhabited, lived, seen. Seen. That’s it. Seen, obviously, by Conor and so there is that feeling again of authorship, of the world having a voice, his voice. He’s invested. He’s making something. His images add up, they articulate a speech (again with that, it’s like I have no vocab at all), they make a language. And like I said when I started this thing - precisely one glass of cheap, sweet, red wine ago – it’s something that I don’t understand, but it’s something I feel. It’s that thing of seeing through someone else’s eyes and getting the emotional landscape that goes along with this, and it’s also the case that this thing is happening not in any romantic way, but in a hushed and mellow way that makes you not even aware that it’s happening. Which is inherently mysterious, I think, inherently complex and hard to figure and hard to speak about and understand, which I think is a great gift, or offering, from Conor to us. And maybe it’s one that’s best to shut the fuck up about, because really, you either get it or you don’t.

By Robert Cook

Solo Exhibition: There Stands The Glass at Black&Blue Gallery, Sydney, 2008

Exhibition Review:

NZ Art Online
Conor O’Brien, There Stands The Glass, Black&Blue Gallery, 2008
by Chris Jones

With painting, thinking builds up gradually. Out on the canvas, after hanging in the imagination it gets plied, erased, smudged, and layered, rethought even, then left a day, or a year, until the painter returns to ﬁnd irrelevance discoloring the oils Something photography brought to ﬂat-art production is fear of irrelevance: fear of being nowhere; not being contemporary. Fear detectable in the brisk visual thinking there in drips and splats plied fast to canvas by Rauschenberg, Twombly, Pollock and Cullen, engaged in a pace of reality capture largely un-seen in western painting before Herschel and Daguerre started, in 1839, ﬁxing it in instants to glass. For fear they and it might disappear Their photographic rate of thinking reality, dovetailing the cognition speeds of contemporary-life, resonates with what might be described irrelevance-fear, there in modern painting after photography began. A basic, mortal fear that, in terms of time, brings life to a photograph, made bright when shot by an artist.
Like Conor O’Brien. His imagination’s like an airport lounge - Eastern Goldﬁelds Airport I reckon - harbouring thoughts long enough they still have legs to ﬂy, unlike painting, a 24-hour bar near departures, pouring out the ﬂightless and Iegless. Conor has ‘no patience for painting‘ he said simply. His There Stands The Glass photography exhibition, carefully arranged to ﬁt the consistently interesting Black & Blue Gallery, Sydney, is that rare contemporary show in that it actually is contemporary - when the word’s an adjective, not noun, like in Contemporary Art, for example. Where painted scenes of Australia - and all of O’Brien’s are Australia - have a mist of atemporal imagination throughout, so that we see neither now or here, O’Brien’s pictures resonate pointedly with now-here relevance: something for Walter Benjamin ‘more important than unity or clarity.‘
But O’Brien’s are far from realism. And miles from abstraction or impressionism. They do often what natural artists, likeWilliam Eggleston, usually do: compose the seen and imagined within visual terms of the present. Robert Cook, Associate Curator at The Art Gallery of Westem Australia touched on this in the exhibition essay writing, ‘what we see, what we feel, is style.‘ Read any careful interpretation of Eggleston’s photography, the word style is there in legion, naming his ability to see and simultaneously imagine a scene so it ﬁts the context it appears within, as a picture. To Eggleston’s penchant for crouching, bending, or annoying his mates to get such a picture O’Brien says, ‘l don’t look for strange angles.‘ O’Brien’s appear effortless, and thereby, more human. Friendly even. But his work in There Stands The Glass echoes Eggleston, as the measured presentation of singular visual thinking, aesthetically balancing what is seen and felt - then and there - in visual terms of now-here. Eggleston, within the brooding light of the South; O’Brien within the broad, brash lights of Australia, radiating throughout There Stands The Glass, and those aesthetic nuances peculiar to photography, enabling the lit to be twisted:
Looking at Ceiling 2006/07, a meter high, white-frame photograph of a white, terraced, ornate corner of a ceiling, full of fractal-like detail, brings familiarity to mind: That’s a ceiling - I’ve seen that before. But longer looking exposes odd shadows, and oddly juxtaposed whites, that do not make optical sense, prodding our imagination into gear. It’s one of the more twisted, imagination-prodding, ordinary photographs I’ve seen. And not a pixel in sight. Similarly, Tarawarra 2006/07, shows a hard-edge, wooden Donald Judd-ish seat, on a vamished concrete floor fronting a large plate glass window, through which a vineyard stretches over a hill to the distance, smoke hissing up in a plume beyond the leaves. It seems ordinary as bread, but with a style making the familiarity of it, which attracts beautifully, chime with a twist making it sing. A song by The Drones, perhaps.
Throughout the exhibition, there are hints of familiarity twisting in everyday scenes that, through O’Brien’s natural, subtle composing, generates the honed ‘emotional landscape‘ Cook emphasises. Fans 2006/07, another meter-tall framed photograph, suggests symbolism at a glance, of relations between men and women, married too long, getting distant. But they then settle into their Australian selves again, as familiar fans, shown in a way - through O’Brien’s timeless style - that generates the lonesomeness The Drones sing of, heard in the laundry when the house is quiet. When you have nothing to do on a summer day, more than potter round the house and look at stuff, with a pool cleaner humming nearby, cicadas twitching, weather rumbling around, in the ‘world of feelings‘ O’Brien talks of and works within, beyond explanation but familiar and deeply unforgettable. Likewise, humming through There Stands The Glass is rare Australian emotion.

Install views: There Stands The Glass at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2008

Exhibition Review:

The Age M Magazine, May 2008
There Stands The Glass, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne
by Penny Modra

Disclaimer: I love Conor O'Brien’s photographs. So much so that I forwent rent and a leather jacket to buy Backyard, from his 2007 Westside Series. The question, in the terrifying property market and leather-clad fashion climate, is why? The pictures, like Proust’s biscuit, seem to be about people and their memories and feelings, without necessarily focusing on people, memories or feelings. And they’re about O'Brien himself, but without forcibly expressing his sense of self. There Stands The Glass, following on from Westside and Hold On To Each Other, shifts further away from portraits to capture spaces where people have been, or are about to enter. Though not staged, the images have been chosen (some using garish flash) - they don’t efface the act of photographing. He’s not asking you to look through his eyes as though they’re your own and share some modernist “epiphany” moment. It’s just an invitation to feel, well, what you feel.