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’.