Baker Artist Portfolios

Danni O’Brien (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Baltimore, Maryland. Her practice is rooted in irreverence, haphazard play, and owned queerness. In the studio, they cycle through continuous acts of deconstruction and reconstruction of found materials and employ assemblage, ceramic handbuilding, paper making, wood working, and CNC routing, to concoct enigmatic, amalgamated sculptures. O’Brien exhibits these sculptures at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, Asya Geisberg Gallery, Tephra ICA, Pazo Fine Art, and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. She has been awarded residencies with PLOP, The Wassaic Project, Proyecto Ace, Art Farm, Baltimore Clayworks, Red Lodge Clay Center, Azule, and the Maple Terrace. She is the recent recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Belle Foundation for Cultural Development. O’Brien received a review of her recent solo exhibition “Cross Sections”, with Tephra ICA, in The Washington Post. They are currently preparing for a solo exhibition with Stone House Art Gallery (SHAG) in Charlotte, NC and a residency with Stove Works in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in Spring 2023.

I transform the cast-offs of our consumerist landscape into sculptural works that are playful, absurd, and fantastical. Queer in their irreverence, compilation of connoted material, and otherworldly affect, my work grapples with dystopian survival, queer identity, and conspicuous consumption. I scavenge found, discarded objects and allow their raw forms to direct my practice, considering a future where these are my only accessible materials. Through tinkering, playing, and mending, I deconstruct the skeletons of scavenged domestic memorabilia and graft them into off-kilter sculptures with paper pulp membranes. Their innate precarity is amusing and unnerving, with hand-wrought visible mending to provide a framework to frugally navigate our capitalistic context. In the relief wall works, I borrow, abstract, and decontextualize diagrams from an array of how-to manuals, DIY books, and outdated science texts, collected from overflowing shelves at thrift stores. These obsolete diagrams lurk in between jaundiced pages at a few inches tall and wide and are blown up and reimagined as monumental, visionary talismans. Nestled inside these tablets are plastic objects I reinterpret as lenses or protrusions delivering and glowing with light, alluding to an absurdist future constructed with the plastic detritus of the last century, providing newly found function and hope.