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.