The Skirt
Danni O’Brien: Wa(r)ning Light
Curated by Zahar Vaks and Lauren Whearty
Opening Reception Saturday Jan 13th, 2024 5-8pm
On View January 13th - March 17th, 2024

Ortega y Gasset Projects proudly presents, Wa(r)ning Light, a solo show of works by Danni O’Brien in the Skirt, opening on Saturday, January 13, 2024, co-curated by OyG Co-Directors Zahar Vaks, and Lauren Whearty. The exhibition will be on view until March 17, 2024. 

O’Brien’s relief sculptures irreverently and humorously combine diagrams with a variety of found objects to create an intersection of machines, flesh, usefulness, and speculation. Early 20th century contraceptive device patents and schematics from a book titled “Contraception Naturally: A Comprehensive Self-Help Guide to Responsible Contraception From Your Kitchen” are abstracted– becoming glyphs on tablets made uncanny through their use of household objects like a dip’n’snack chip bowl, vintage humidifier, clamshell jewelry boxes, alabaster stone eggs, a star shaped jar opener, and light. 

O’Brien collects these historically gendered, mostly plastic, and visibly used items once they’ve been discarded. Their domiciliary nature and anthropomorphized and organic forms emulate crevices, cycles, and habitats, all of which point to the body and its systems. Illustrations of a diaphragm insertion or homemade barriers are drawn with pipe cleaners embedded in paper pulp slabs, evoking the earliest forms of language like carved stone petroglyphs, where bulbous forms emerge from organic rock formations. Others are articulations of early, intimate contraceptive aids and tools themselves, forming larger than life machine-like contraptions. In each speculative sculpture, O’Brien uses this scale shift, highlighting the urgency and importance of their content.

This site responsive and intimate installation situates paper pulp membraned assemblages in response to the rhythm of the Skirt’s corridor, echoing the exposed architectural textures, like the foundation stone, pipes, and concrete. Lanky, coiling, twisting, and buckling electric cords dance and meander across the walls and floor, signifying connectivity and usefulness. Absurd in their scale and logic, these dysfunctional lighthouses softly glow, attracting, rather than repelling. 

Like many dichotomies present in O’Brien’s work, this installation draws on the mid-20th centuries futuristic imagination of a space age utilitarian world, while also presenting the failures of that imagined future, and our dystopian present. In The Temptation of the Diagram Matthew Ritchie says, “Diagrams not only describe reality but also in some sense enlarge it, simply by coming into being.” O’Brien’s immersive installation shows this monumentalizing quality in a physical way- each diagrammatic work has the attention-grabbing quality of billboards, inundating us with symbolic language that illustrates our past while warning us of the future.

Just as elaborate as they are economic, O’Brien incorporates the precision of a computerized router with hand wrought and sculpted paper pulp to maintain the sense of the hand-made. This approach is evidenced in her bold use of color, surface, and texture. Through reimagining mundane, nostalgic found objects as beacons, O’Brien actively queers these materials, asking them to perform, pretend, and bend– transforming their original function, culminating into a new cross section of material culture and gendered bodies. The resulting reliefs function as absurdist nighlights and talismans beaming with hope for reproductive justice, and warning lights for what's at stake in this current moment of government mandated, waning bodily autonomy.

Artist Bio
Danni O’Brien (she/they), b. 1992 in Virginia, is a queer, interdisciplinary artist working between Baltimore, Maryland and Central Kansas. O’Brien received their BFA in Sculpture from James Madison University in 2014. Her work has been exhibited with Asya Geisberg Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, Belger Arts Center, and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. She has been awarded residencies with PLOP (London, UK), Proyecto Ace (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Baltimore Clayworks, and Art Farm, among others. In 2023 they were a resident artist at Stove Works, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, and Wassaic Project. Her 2022 solo exhibition, Cross Sections, with Tephra ICA, was reviewed in the Washington Post. In February 2024, O’Brien will be the Artist in Residence at Furman University in Greenville, SC and is looking forward to an upcoming two person exhibition with Cleo Gallery in Savannah, GA.