Exhibition Review (Extract):

Art Monthly Australia. July 2012 Conor O’Brien, Photographs 2003-2011, Australian Centre for Photography by Pedro De Almeida

Oblique, still, tender: qualities marking Conor O’Brien’s approach to picture-making which are in pitch perfect tune with the aesthetic temperament of his subjects. Photographs 2003-2011, recently presented at the Australian Centre for Photography, is O’Brien’s first major survey show, offering a judicious selection and hang of photographs, each printed in various dimensions and set in white box frames, accompanied by a showcase featuring his modest yet highly accomplished artist’s books.

Despite the considered framing, each photograph gives a sense of having been captured with sideways glances, with subjects - a stack of plastic chairs, the facade of a suburban home, a figure wrapped in a patchwork quilt — presented to the viewer in a contradictory state of state of quiet stillness and delicate transition. Landscapes of green hills, snow-capped mountains and placid bodies of water are diorama-like in their completeness as tiny worlds, whilst the most apparent aspect of O’Brien’s work as presented in this survey is the viewer’s gaze returned., much less challenged: human subjects are presented with eyes closed, with hands covering the face, or altogether turning their backs to the camera.

In Cobain, O’Brien presents a magazine cover of a commemorative issue of Rolling Stone following Kurt Cobain’s suicide, which acts as the singular instance of an eyes-open portrait, significantly in simulacrum. Cobain’s oft-quoted dictum (itself reprised from the lyrics of Neil Young) that ‘it’s better to burn out than to fade away’, intended as a provocative artistic incitement, is here ignored by O’Brien who shows that he can see beyond this False dichotomy. These photographs show that genuine wonder can exist beyond the Fresh eyes of youth where for many there is just spectacle, boredom and cynicism.

Wisely, O’Brien let the Psychological potential of each image do the heavy lifting rather than employing the often cloying interventions of more conceptually driven practices; his work acts as a beautiful, life-affirming coda to a lapsed idea of youth, walking a steady path from innocence to worldliness with neither irony nor nostalgia.

Working within the special confines of the medium, which is to say both its formal qualities as a lens-based view of the world and the always latent prejudices and misconceptions of its reception by audiences. Photographs 2003-2011 is a difficult, admirable achievement. Like E.M. Forster’s famous epigraph in Howards End - a masterful novel of the shifting psychological dimensions of the inner and outer life, the seen and unseen - O’Brien seeks to, and succeeds in, stoking the always unfulfilled desire to ‘only connect’.

 

Catalogue Essay:

Conor O’Brien, Photographs 2003-2011 at Australian Centre for Photography By Dan Rule

To even frame this collection of works by Conor O’Brien as a retrospective seems somewhat misplaced. Granted, there are all the familiar symptoms. On paper, Conor O’Brien: Photographs 2003/2011 proposes a consideration of eight years of profuse image-gathering – a reflection upon a body of work that has made an unmistakable contribution to Australian contemporary photography’s recent incarnation and fabric, a body of work that has both eschewed photographic formalism and forged an alluring syntax of its own. On paper, yes, we are looking back.

But there is something amiss in this line of thought when considering O’Brien’s oeuvre. The staid connotations of the descriptors ‘survey’ or ‘retrospective’ tend to betray the photographer’s continued prolificacy; the implied passivity of the retrospective doesn’t sit comfortably alongside his comparative youth. But there is something else at play here, something very much inherent – as we, and O’Brien, are beginning to learn – to his artistic practice.

Indeed, rather than fulfilling the well-worn trope of the reflexive survey – or in simple (or perhaps cynical) terms, the dusting off of old work – this exhibition offers a far more activated illustration of O’Brien’s current process, of what he has come to describe as his “ongoing edit”.

Unlike many artists, O’Brien is unafraid to engage with his past. In fact, he actively and enthusiastically does so. Where his photographs speak of an almost unconscious and oblique candidness and automation, he archives, sorts and curates his bodies of work with the rigorousness of a historian. New photographs become new access points, new activators, to older works; familiarities are recognised and articulated; repeated motifs or gestures become previously unrecognised linkages, traces or glyphs. He studies the new in order to learn about the old, teasing out the work’s lineage, its bloodline. It becomes cyclical – an interchange of reinterpretations.

O’Brien’s recent images also inspire this kind of engagement in their audience, and perhaps this is the subtle mastery of his work. We learn about his old via his new, more so than the other way around. To suggest that the evocative snippets of atmosphere-laden landscapes, snow-covered mountain peaks and wind-blown human subjects that marked his recent The Last White Cloud series enlivened several of his past works would border on understatement.

The Perth-raised photographer’s impulsive, off-the-cuff means of shooting has always attracted its share of champions – among them Melbourne artist Thomas Jeppe’s Serps Press imprint and Sydney’s Rainoff Books, each of whom published sought after editions on O’Brien – but those same seemingly offhand rejections of formalism have also garnered some detractors.

But with reflection and with time, O’Brien’s work reveals itself for what it really is, and this is the precise power of Conor O’Brien: Photographs 2003/2011. His wonderfully effortless – at times even a little wonky – images are web of moments and instances otherwise lost. They are markers and memory capsules amid the throes of an evolving personal history.

O’Brien himself put it best when he described working on this exhibition. “It is a current show, featuring some old works.” That it is.

 

 

Exhibition Review (Extract):

Broadsheet Online, 2011 Conor O’Brien, The Last White Cloud at Block Projects By Dan Rule

Across a suite of seven photographs, he translates a mountainous, alpine landscape into something immediate and emotive. What might be interpreted as atmosphere or spaciousness assumes a kind of loaded presence.

In one work, a cragged rock formation juts out of the snow, towering like a sculpture, a hero piece. It is permanent and powerful. In another, a blizzard engulfs a mountainside, a cluster of boulders and a barbed wire fence barely visible through the cloud of falling ice. It is a moment, an instant, a fleeting vantage. What lies in front of our eyes, O’Brien seems to stipulate, has the potential to disappear at any moment. Another work sees a flash throw a short span of light across a darkened forest path. What lies beyond the blinding flare of soil and pine is unknown. It is a moment, condensed and contained.

Two of strongest works feature a young man and woman, each silhouetted against a lake and mountainous backdrop, their backs turned to the lens. That we avoid their gaze is crucial. They are signifiers of an experience shared, of an intimacy.

 

 

Book Review (extract):

The Thousands Online, 2011 Conor O’Brien, The Passed Note By Max Olijnyk

Thematically, The Passed Note has repeated images of tethered vessels, white things and doors, as well as a sprinkling of familiar characters, mostly female. According to Conor, the book ‘has a real teenage feeling and emotion to it’, backed up by the title and a typically bittersweet short story Butterfly Knife, written by his partner Amanda Maxwell.

To my eyes, this emotion feels removed by several degrees, like in the photo of a book about Kurt Cobain, or the word ‘Youth’ peering out from another pile of books, partially obscured by a comfy blanket. Unlike many of his peers who pride themselves on their immersion in the scene, O’Brien is reflecting on a purity that can never be recovered, but remembered fondly for all its dusty, sun-bleached goodness.

 

 

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

 

 

 

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.