Danni OBrien

Work samples

Low Hanging Fruit Installation

2023
Media: Instrument stand, five dried gourds, two decorative wax apples, found electrical pipe, gear rack, exercise equipment, rubber gasket, plumbing fixture, candle holder, soap dish, work light base, two tripods, silicone molds of a radish and a banana, prop ear, back massager, bendy straw, picture hanger, fake wood, real wood, football kickoff tee, ceramic fake pepper, unknown metal object, key chain, suction cup phone holder, electronic jumper cables, ice cleat, carabiner, hanging hat display, slingshot, exercise equipment pulls, foam handles, suspenders, six drain snakes, automotive tubing, magnifying glass, spring, hand-built ceramics, wire, chain, plasti dip, paper pulp, epoxy, paint
10 x 10 x 8 ft.

Slowly constructed over ten months through constant tinkering, this delicately balanced sculptural installation combines found objects with paper pulp, dried gourds, and artificial fruits. Through material layering, I attempt to conflate body and machine, natural and artificial, and sexual and mechanical. 'Low Hanging Fruit' reappropriates corporate lingo to symbolize the vulnerability of queers (fruits). The hanging, black, antennaed component magnifies a heat-collapsed wax apple, creating a grotesque spectacle for viewers. On the ground, spindly, sprawling forms made from fake 'wood' are joined with mundane materials like a guitar stand and back scratcher, coupled through glossy, peach-colored, hand-built ceramic hardware. A kitschy picture hanger, degraded football tee, and welded form act as crutches, stabilizing the work. Without adhesives or internal supports, the work remains precarious, always on the verge of disintegration. Through its spatial defiance, I aim to evoke an optimistic vision for the future of queerness in an interdependent society.
Humidify Her

2024
Media: Found diagram from 1938 US Patent For distension douche, vintage plastic humidifier base, two jewelry box liners, three alabaster eggs, broken light bulb, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, LED lights, electrical cords, ceramic hardware, foam, wood
50 x 62 x 7 in.
Ready Set Go

2025
media: recumbent exerciser, hose misters, gear rack, ab rocker, resistance bands, hair curlers, magnets, cast aluminum, cast wax, dried gourds, welded steel, epoxy resin clay, paper pulp, paint
60 x 72 x 68 in.
Seventeen green PT resistance bands are linked into an undulating tube, suggesting a quasi-medical device. Inspired by recent doctor visits seeking answers to chronic illness, I employ medical motifs : looping tubes, wheeled instruments, and institutional green. Two homegrown gourds, painted matte verdant green, anchor the piece. One rotted as it dried, forming a grotesque orifice, presented at eye level like a parasitic growth. The other, a long snake gourd, acts as both appendage and crutch, supported—and supporting the sculpture—by a single dumbbell of the same color. The primary structure contains portions with glossy, original powder coating, preserved by now-removed foam and rubber handles. This unstable, tangled structure reflects the uncertainty and instability of living with illness.
Endless Scroll, Exercising Girlies

2024
felt tip marker on white drafting paper, push up bars, pilates bars, carboard tube
16 x 480 x 16 in.

A 12-inch-tall paper scroll extends 40 feet from the first to the last drawing. It can be displayed by manually advancing it on push-up bars across a floor or table, or installed as wallpaper encasing a room. The drawings depict outdated patent applications for home exercise equipment from the past century, specifically showing women using the machines. These images evoke associations with torture devices, BDSM, and cyborgs. They also act as a time capsule, preserving and archiving beauty standards and gender norms of their eras through details like fashion, hairstyles, and body types. In my drawings, I use dotted lines following the patent convention, where they suggest possible movement, activation, or transformation. In the original patents, machines are depicted with solid lines and bodies with dashes. In Endless Scroll, Exercising Girlies, these distinctions dissolve: bodies and machines merge into swirling constellations of intersecting dashed lines, creating cyborg diagrams.

About Danni

Danni O’Brien is an interdisciplinary visual artist based in Baltimore, Maryland. Working across drawing, sculpture, ceramics, and installation, their practice is rooted in tinkering, irreverence, and queerness. O’Brien scavenges and collects discarded materials, creating enigmatic assemblages through ongoing acts of deconstruction and reconstruction. They employ processes such as gardening, paper-making, ceramic hand-building, mold making and casting, metalworking, woodworking, and… more

View Danni 's Resume

Toning Systems (2024-2025)

Toning Systems is the name of both a solo exhibition at Visarts that took place in Fall 2025, and an ongoing body of work.

"Danni O’Brien reconfigures accumulations of discarded exercise equipment and other consumer excess to form cyborgian creatures, imbuing their sculptures and drawings with an uncanny vitality. In Toning Systems, O’Brien asks not simply what happens to these objects when their appeal or use value fades, but more urgently: what happens to “our” things when we are gone? These objects do not appear as passive vestiges of depleted functionality. Instead, they seem to take on new functions that we can sense but not make sense of, presenting the possibility of material agencies that exceed a human context. Domestic refuse intermingles with wax-cast and dried gourds to create strange hybrids, collapsing anachronism into novelty and the synthetic into the organic. In conversation, the works oscillate between revealing and rebuking meaning. Deconstructed products and diagrammatic forms insist on a hyperawareness of the structure and materiality of things that deliberately fails to cohere into a stable logic. O’Brien’s intimation of a posthuman future is less concerned with our own ending than it is with the possibility of growth and renewal outside of human—and specifically capitalist—domination. Toning Systems offers a speculative glimpse into the lives of things beyond human-engineered obsolescence."

--Maura Callahan

Toning Systems Installation Shot

This installation view, taken from outside the gallery, shows my recent solo exhibition, Toning Systems, at VisArts in Rockville, Maryland.
Ready Set Go

2025
media: recumbent exerciser, hose misters, gear rack, ab rocker, resistance bands, hair curlers, magnets, cast aluminum, cast wax, dried gourds, welded steel, epoxy resin clay, paper pulp, paint
60 x 72 x 68 in.
Seventeen green PT resistance bands are linked into an undulating tube, suggesting a quasi-medical device. Inspired by recent doctor visits seeking answers to chronic illness, I employ medical motifs : looping tubes, wheeled instruments, and institutional green. Two homegrown gourds, painted matte verdant green, anchor the piece. One rotted as it dried, forming a grotesque orifice, presented at eye level like a parasitic growth. The other, a long snake gourd, acts as both appendage and crutch, supported—and supporting the sculpture—by a single dumbbell of the same color. The primary structure contains portions with glossy, original powder coating, preserved by now-removed foam and rubber handles. This unstable, tangled structure reflects the uncertainty and instability of living with illness.
Alabaster Apple Apparatus

2023
media: dried gourds, cast recycled wax, door stoppers, under desk elliptical machine, hotel luggage cart, hula hoop, rubber gasket, found pipe, foam exercise wraps, electrical coupler, foot pump, vintage conservation tool hose, meat thermometer, alabaster apple, steel pipe, hair curlers, rhinestones, magnetic recipe holder, wooden dowels, campfire logs, binder rings, nerf dart, photo clip mobile, hardware, cardboard puzzle piece, leather paint, paper pulp, chrome paint
48 x 60 x 68 in.

Thinking about neon green as an unnatural, and post apocalyptic color provoked his cyborgian contraption with wax gourds, real gourds, and interconnected found objects. A fluorescent wax gourd with lime green rhinestones is pierced by a metal probe, symbolizing a source of power. An alabaster apple rests atop a yoga ball air pump, gently compressing it in a playful nod to Rube Goldberg. The work’s sense of precarity is ever-present, on the verge of collapsing back into a heap of discarded materials and dried fruit.
Twist Stepper I Barely Know Her

Media: pink stepper machine, ab rocker, backpacking frame, found metal, gear rack, bike rack, spring, hair curlers, dumbells, foot massage roller, dried long dipper gourds, jump rope handles, Pilates exercise bands, seed pods, napkin holder, napkin rings, s hooks, display stand, cast wax, paper pulp, paint, rhinestones
24 x 26 x 44 in.

The foundation for this work is a disoriented “twist stepper” exercise machine, once clad in pink plastic pads and hardware, designed for women, now stripped and reimagined. Borrowing its bubblegum pink, I thread together segmented, decontextualized objects—a pilates resistance band, hair curlers, a dumbbell, and a foot massager—alongside seed pods, cast candle wax, and a found metal spring. The piece draws inspiration from architectural models and maquettes, whimsical, historical exercise equipment and their patents, and commercial displays. The sculpture was completed over a stretch of eleven months and acts as a stream of consciousness drawing in space, ruled by hybridization, glitched assembly, and reconfiguration.
Lemon Pull Up

Media: found basketball returner, resistance bands, jump rope, dried gourd, cast reclaimed candle wax, yoga ball air pump, fake lemon, fake grapes, shoe horn keychain, light brite pegs, bag clip, rubber bands, found metal hooks, chain, paint, flocking
58 x 15 x 17 in.
Playground Maquette

Media: Dumbbells, cast wax, candle, gourd stem
5 x 13 x 12 in.
Sad Beige Pyramid Scheme

Media: found weight rack, back massager, dumbbells, pillar candles, stone paper weight, dried gourd, cast wax, paper pulp, hardware
24 x 16 x 8 in.

Dumbbells, scented candles, a stone paperweight, purse lining, and a wooden back massager are strategically stacked on a pyramid-shaped dumbbell rack clad in peach paper pulp. This triangular tower balances on giant taupe candles, themselves set atop wax casts of fake rocks. At its peak, an empty silicone dumbbell sleeve encases a dried, flesh-colored squash. The pyramid—composed of peach, beige, and tan fleshy, smelly cast wax—evokes a totem or memorial, though to what remains unclear. Tuned to the oft-ridiculed “sad beige” palette of domestic and wellness products for women, twisting gourds transform the mass into a living web of detritus and overgrowth.
Dumbells I

Media: found exercise device handles, cast recycled candle wax
6 x 7 x 3 in.
Innards

Media: found vintage ankle weight, sewing pins, paper pulp, foam, wood
20 x 24 x 3 in.
Pressure Point

Media:found diagram from patent for “Exercise Weight”, dried gourd, pressure point massage ball, rubber ring, pipe cleaners, paper pulp, foam, wood
36 x 14 x 5 in.

Recent Works on Paper (2024-ongoing)

My practice involves drawing, collage, and cyanotype as ways to explore collected images and paper ephemera. Lately, my work has focused on the intersection of the self-improvement industry, at-home exercise equipment from the past century, and gendered health and fitness ephemera spanning from 1900 to the present.

Endless Scroll, Exercising Girlies

2024
felt tip marker on white drafting paper, push up bars, pilates bars, carboard tube
16 x 480 x 16 in.

A 12-inch-tall paper scroll extends 40 feet from the first to the last drawing. It can be displayed by manually advancing it on push-up bars across a floor or table, or installed as wallpaper encasing a room. The drawings depict outdated patent applications for home exercise equipment from the past century, specifically showing women using the machines. These images evoke associations with torture devices, BDSM, and cyborgs. They also act as a time capsule, preserving and archiving beauty standards and gender norms of their eras through details like fashion, hairstyles, and body types. In my drawings, I use dotted lines following the patent convention, where they suggest possible movement, activation, or transformation. In the original patents, machines are depicted with solid lines and bodies with dashes. In Endless Scroll, Exercising Girlies, these distinctions dissolve: bodies and machines merge into swirling constellations of intersecting dashed lines, creating cyborg diagrams.
Endless Scroll, Exercising Girlies (detail)

2024
felt tip marker on white drafting paper, push up bars, pilates bars, carboard tube
16 x 480 x 16 in.

A 12-inch-tall paper scroll extends 40 feet from the first to the last drawing. It can be displayed by manually advancing it on push-up bars across a floor or table, or installed as wallpaper encasing a room. The drawings depict outdated patent applications for home exercise equipment from the past century, specifically showing women using the machines. These images evoke associations with torture devices, BDSM, and cyborgs. They also act as a time capsule, preserving and archiving beauty standards and gender norms of their eras through details like fashion, hairstyles, and body types. In my drawings, I use dotted lines following the patent convention, where they suggest possible movement, activation, or transformation. In the original patents, machines are depicted with solid lines and bodies with dashes. In Endless Scroll, Exercising Girlies, these distinctions dissolve: bodies and machines merge into swirling constellations of intersecting dashed lines, creating cyborg diagrams.
Endless Scroll, Exercising Girlies (detail)

2024
felt tip marker on white drafting paper, push up bars, pilates bars, carboard tube
16 x 480 x 16 in.

A 12-inch-tall paper scroll extends 40 feet from the first to the last drawing. It can be displayed by manually advancing it on push-up bars across a floor or table, or installed as wallpaper encasing a room. The drawings depict outdated patent applications for home exercise equipment from the past century, specifically showing women using the machines. These images evoke associations with torture devices, BDSM, and cyborgs. They also act as a time capsule, preserving and archiving beauty standards and gender norms of their eras through details like fashion, hairstyles, and body types. In my drawings, I use dotted lines following the patent convention, where they suggest possible movement, activation, or transformation. In the original patents, machines are depicted with solid lines and bodies with dashes. In Endless Scroll, Exercising Girlies, these distinctions dissolve: bodies and machines merge into swirling constellations of intersecting dashed lines, creating cyborg diagrams.
Endless Scroll, Exercising Girlies (detail)

2024
felt tip marker on white drafting paper, push up bars, pilates bars, cardboard tube
16 x 480 x 16 in.

A 12-inch-tall paper scroll extends 40 feet from the first to the last drawing. It can be displayed by manually advancing it on push-up bars across a floor or table, or installed as wallpaper encasing a room. The drawings depict outdated patent applications for home exercise equipment from the past century, specifically showing women using the machines. These images evoke associations with torture devices, BDSM, and cyborgs. They also act as a time capsule, preserving and archiving beauty standards and gender norms of their eras through details like fashion, hairstyles, and body types. In my drawings, I use dotted lines following the patent convention, where they suggest possible movement, activation, or transformation. In the original patents, machines are depicted with solid lines and bodies with dashes. In Endless Scroll, Exercising Girlies, these distinctions dissolve: bodies and machines merge into swirling constellations of intersecting dashed lines, creating cyborg diagrams.
Sun Lamp Cyanotype 06

2025
Cyanotype
8 x 10 in.
Sun Lamp Cyanotype is an ongoing series that began at the Vermont Studio Center during my time as a Windgate Craft Fellow in October 2025. In this project, I use a found, vintage artificial sun tanning lamp—once marketed as a tool for beauty and self-improvement—to expose images onto UV-sensitive cyanotype paper. This process deliberately connects the act of image-making to the world of commodified self-improvement technologies. By using the lamp as both subject and tool, I highlight the parallels between the technologies designed to alter bodies and the imagery these technologies inspire, all rooted in the same product-driven culture.
Through decontextualization, abstraction, and combination, I merge found images to create hybrid, cyborgian forms. These visual experiments echo the way self-improvement devices promise bodily transformation through technological intervention. Just as the tanning lamp reimagines the body through exposure, the resulting images reassemble and reframe the source material—primarily outdated United States patent application drawings for at-home exercise equipment—into new, speculative bodies and machines.
Sun Lamp Cyanotype 12

2025
Cyanotype
8 x 10 in.

Sun Lamp Cyanotype is an ongoing series that began at the Vermont Studio Center during my time as a Windgate Craft Fellow in October 2025. In this project, I use a found, vintage artificial sun tanning lamp—once marketed as a tool for beauty and self-improvement—to expose images onto UV-sensitive cyanotype paper. This process deliberately connects the act of image-making to the world of commodified self-improvement technologies. By using the lamp as both subject and tool, I highlight the parallels between the technologies designed to alter bodies and the imagery these technologies inspire, all rooted in the same product-driven culture.
Through decontextualization, abstraction, and combination, I merge found images to create hybrid, cyborgian forms. These visual experiments echo the way self-improvement devices promise bodily transformation through technological intervention. Just as the tanning lamp reimagines the body through exposure, the resulting images reassemble and reframe the source material—primarily outdated United States patent application drawings for at-home exercise equipment—into new, speculative bodies and machines.

End of Day (2023-ongoing)

End of Day is an ongoing series of sixteen small sculptural works that began at the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency in 2023. The series takes its name from a factory tradition known as “end of day,” where workers, at the close of their shifts, would use leftover materials to create unique or experimental objects. This tradition is personally meaningful to me: my grandfather, who worked in a ceramic pipe factory in Junction City, Ohio, would often craft nature-inspired sculptures from clay scraps at the end of his workday. His practice of transforming remnants into art forms the conceptual foundation for this body of work.

Each piece in the series—whether wall-bound, free-standing, or hanging—pairs a common domestic object with a wax-cast gourd. The wax itself is sourced exclusively from recycled candle remnants and materials from previous projects, resulting in casts that carry layered, sometimes overpoweringly sweet scents. For example, one piece in the series blends the fragrances of vanilla, citrus, and red "Christmas" candles, creating a sensory experience that recalls the materials’ origins. I am particularly interested in the creative constraints of using only recycled wax, which shapes the final colors, textures, and scents of each object.

End of Day (Bottle Holder)

2023
Media: Found metal wine bottle holder, cast recycled candle wax, hardware
12 x 8 x 8 in.
End of Day (Instrument)

2023
Media: found instrument, cast recycled candle wax, hardware
18 x 15 x 4 in.
End of Day (Hook)

2023
Brass hook, cast gourds of melted down pillar candles, hardware
8 x 5 x 6 in.
End of Day (Tie Holder)

2023
Media: Tie holder, hardware protector sleeves, cast recycled candle wax, two plastic leaves, large s hooks, plastic caps, chain
18 x 12 x 5 in.
End of Day (Sprinkler I)

2023
Found plastic hose sprinkler, two recycled wax cast gourds, purse handle, hardware
18 x 8 x 4 in.
End of Day (Sprinkler II)

2024
found plastic hose sprinkler, two recycled wax cast gourds
10 x 10 x 4 in.
End of Day (Nutcracker)

2023
Media: found nutcracker, horse bit, s hooks, cast recycled candle wax
20 x 8 x 7 in
End of Day (Basters)

2025
found turkey basters, cast recycled wax
12 x 6 x 3 in.
End of Day (Roller)

2025
vintage office chair caster, cast recycled candle wax
3 x 5 x 3 in.
End of Day (Halo)

2025
found metal, dried gourd, chrome paint
10 x 6 x 3 in.

Wa(r)ning Light (2023-2024)

"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."

--Press release for "Wa(r)ning Light" at Ortega y Gasset Projects, Spring 2024.

Humidify Her

2024
Media: Found diagram from 1938 US Patent For distension douche, vintage plastic humidifier base, two jewelry box liners, three alabaster eggs, broken light bulb, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, LED lights, electrical cords, ceramic hardware, foam, wood
50 x 62 x 7 in.
Humidify Her (detail)

2024
Found diagram from 1938 US Patent For distension douche, vintage plastic humidifier base, two jewelry box liners, three alabaster eggs, broken light bulb, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, LED lights, electrical cords, ceramic hardware, foam, wood
50 x 62 x 7 in.
Spiral Syringe

2023
Media: found diagram from 1929 US Patent for “Vaginal Syringe”, dog bowl, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, LED light, electrical cord, foam, wood
36 x 33 x 5 in.; 77 x 33 x 5 in. installed with cord
Spiral Syringe

2023
Media: found diagram from 1929 US Patent for “Vaginal Syringe”, dog bowl, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, LED light, electrical cord, foam, wood
36 x 33 x 5 in.; 77 x 33 x 5 in. installed with cord
Baby Less Blue

2024
Media: found diagram from "Contraception Naturally!: A Comprehensive Self-help Guide to Responsible Contraception from Your Kitchen", jar opener, ribbed plastic bowl, epoxy clay, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, holiday light bulbs, LED light, electrical cord, foam, wood
35 x 40 x 7 in; 75 x 40 x 7 in. installed with cord
Baby Less Blue (detail)

2024
Media: found diagram from "Contraception Naturally!: A Comprehensive Self-help Guide to Responsible Contraception from Your Kitchen", jar opener, ribbed plastic bowl, epoxy clay, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, holiday light bulbs, LED light, electrical cord, foam, wood
35 x 40 x 7 in; 75 x 40 x 7 in. installed with cord
Pie Hole Pessary

2024
Media: found diagram from 1967 US patent for a pessary, silicone baby food tray, LED light, electrical cord, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, rhinestones, flocking, foam, wood
24 x 20 x 4 in.
Pie Hole Pessary (detail)

2024
Media: found diagram from 1967 US patent for a pessary, silicone baby food tray, LED light, electrical cord, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, rhinestones, flocking, foam, wood
24 x 20 x 4 in.
Speculative Speculum

2024
Found diagram from 1927 US patent for a speculum, plastic soap dish, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, LED light, electrical cord
31 x 22 x 4 in
Speculative Speculum (detail)

2024
Found diagram from 1927 US patent for a speculum, plastic soap dish, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, LED light, electrical cord
31 x 22 x 4 in

Low Hanging Fruit (2023)

"In this entirely three dimensional showcase, O’Brien reassembles formally functional tools and objects to provide new explorations about queer survivalism in a post dystopian society. Delicately balanced figures are composed of scavenged remnants from unknown origins and combined with membranous paper pulp in these playfully absurd new works. The literally and metaphorically “low” hanging fruit grapples with vulnerability and resistance in a conspicuously accessible throw-away culture. Through their spatial defiance, these works invoke an optimistic proclivity towards the future of queerness in an interdependent society. "

- taken from the press release for a solo exhibition by the same name, at SHAG (Stone House Art Gallery) in Charlotte, North Carolina in May, 2023.

Low Hanging Fruit Installation

2023
Media: Instrument stand, five dried gourds, two decorative wax apples, found electrical pipe, gear rack, exercise equipment, rubber gasket, plumbing fixture, candle holder, soap dish, work light base, two tripods, silicone molds of a radish and a banana, prop ear, back massager, bendy straw, picture hanger, fake wood, real wood, football kickoff tee, ceramic fake pepper, unknown metal object, key chain, suction cup phone holder, electronic jumper cables, ice cleat, carabiner, hanging hat display, slingshot, exercise equipment pulls, foam handles, suspenders, six drain snakes, automotive tubing, magnifying glass, spring, hand-built ceramics, wire, chain, plasti dip, paper pulp, epoxy, paint
10 x 10 x 8 ft.

Slowly constructed over ten months through constant tinkering, this delicately balanced sculptural installation combines found objects with paper pulp, dried gourds, and artificial fruits. Through material layering, I attempt to conflate body and machine, natural and artificial, and sexual and mechanical. 'Low Hanging Fruit' reappropriates corporate lingo to symbolize the vulnerability of queers (fruits). The hanging, black, antennaed component magnifies a heat-collapsed wax apple, creating a grotesque spectacle for viewers. On the ground, spindly, sprawling forms made from fake 'wood' are joined with mundane materials like a guitar stand and back scratcher, coupled through glossy, peach-colored, hand-built ceramic hardware. A kitschy picture hanger, degraded football tee, and welded form act as crutches, stabilizing the work. Without adhesives or internal supports, the work remains precarious, always on the verge of disintegration. Through its spatial defiance, I aim to evoke an optimistic vision for the future of queerness in an interdependent society.
Low Hanging Fruit Installation (alternate view)

2023
Media: Instrument stand, five dried gourds, two decorative wax apples, found electrical pipe, gear rack, exercise equipment, rubber gasket, plumbing fixture, candle holder, soap dish, work light base, two tripods, silicone molds of a radish and a banana, prop ear, back massager, bendy straw, picture hanger, fake wood, real wood, football kickoff tee, ceramic fake pepper, unknown metal object, key chain, suction cup phone holder, electronic jumper cables, ice cleat, carabiner, hanging hat display, slingshot, exercise equipment pulls, foam handles, suspenders, six drain snakes, automotive tubing, magnifying glass, spring, hand-built ceramics, wire, chain, plasti dip, paper pulp, epoxy, paint
10 x 10 x 8 ft.
Low Hanging Fruit II

2023
Two dried gourds, football kickoff tee, silicone mold of banana, ceramic fake pepper, unknown metal object, key chain, suction cup phone holder, electronic jumper cables, black plasti dipped wire, ice cleat, carabiner, hanging hat display, handmade ceramics, paper pulp
120 x 24 x 32 in.
Low Hanging Fruit II (detail)

2023
Two dried gourds, football kickoff tee, silicone mold of banana, ceramic fake pepper, unknown metal object, key chain, suction cup phone holder, electronic jumper cables, black plasti dipped wire, ice cleat, carabiner, hanging hat display, handmade ceramics, paper pulp
120 x 24 x 32 in.
Low Hanging Fruit I

2023
Instrument stand, three dried gourds, two deformed wax apples, found electrical pipe, gear rack, exercise equipment, rubber gasket, plumbing fixture, candle holder, soap dish, work light base, picture hanging tripod, homemade tripod, silicone mold of a radish, inside out silicone prop ear, massage attachment, bendy straw, handmade ceramics, fake wood, real wood, paper pulp
24 x 60 x 86 in.
Tool for Introspection

2023
media: found slingshot, exercise equipment, fake fruits, foam handles, drain snakes, automotive tubing, gear rack, magnifying glass, plastic packaging, rubber caps, silicone O ring, wine stopper, metal spring, puffy paint, epoxy, paint
84 x 24 x 30 in.
Pressure-fit and counterbalanced post-consumer black plastic home and leisure items—known to contain an exorbitant amount of chemicals due to their origin as e-waste—are assembled together. This work is suspended at varying heights, ideally where it feels natural to place a hand beneath it. Alternatively, it can be installed as part of the Low Hanging Fruit Installation, floating just inches above Low Hanging Fruit II, nearly touching. The piece is intended as a tool for curiosity, and play, and introspection.
Carrot and Stick

2023
Found metal stand, casters, paint roller sleeves, shower curtain rod, two coat racks, massage device, pump for Halloween mask, twenty six nerf darts, baseball holder, silicone mold of a peach, inside out prop ear, paper pulp
88 x 44 x 28 in.
Soft as a Grape

2023
Media: Steamer, pipe cover, packing foam, electric candle, flag pole holder, bendy straws, plastic coated chain, bike lock, pipe cleaner, purse drawstrings, rubber grapes, shower curtain rings, cat toy, artificial garlic, doll stand, pillar candle, wax apple, ice pack, barbie phone, napkin rings, gear ties, bouncy ball, electrical cord, electrical jump cables, plasti dipped wire, silicone skeleton fingers, ceramic gourd, spring, jump rope handles, three bag clips, extruded plastic, masking tape, hand-built ceramics, hard wired LED light, paper pulp, encaustic, paint
76 x 90 x 70 in.

Constructed through experiments in counterbalancing and leveraging, the various components of this sculptural work are indispensable–clinging to, hoisting, and grounding each other to survive. I transform the base of the deconstructed steamer into a complex assemblage of white and pale pink plastics, resembling either an architectural model or a disorganized power box, complete with the ability to plug in and light up. Artificial grapes are included for their sensual and pleasurable associations. They are presented in life-size, miniature, and disassembled forms, with their spherical tips weighing down pink plastic dowels to create buoyant, arched shapes. Following a “whole hog” approach, I spare no material shred from my disassembled object library. This maximal work privileges scrappiness, incorporating materials collected from stoop free piles, yard sales, and dumpster diving, over several years. Resolved while in residence with Stove Works, this work was featured in my solo exhibition with SHAG in Charlotte, NC.
Soft as a Grape (detail)

2023
Standing steamer, under sink piping cover, packing foam, battery operated candle night light, flag pole holder, five bendy straws, plastic coated bike lock, pipe cleaner, wax, pleather purse drawstrings, life size fake grapes, tiny fake grapes, shower curtain ring, cat toy, fake garlic, doll stand, giant candle, deformed wax apple, ice pack, telephone wire, napkin rings, gear ties, bouncy ball, hand built ceramics, fabric coated electrical cord, electrical jump cables, white plasti dipped wire, two inside out skeleton fingers, ceramic gourd tip, spring, four jump rope handles, hard wired LED light, three bag clips, extruded plastic, abandoned middle school art tape snake, paper pulp, paint
76 x 90 x 70 in.
Simple (Pleasure) Machine

2023
found vintage rubber grapes, binder rings, pulley, aircraft cable, hardware
144 x 96 x 30 in.

I made this as a companion to “Soft as a Grape” for exhibition at Belger Arts Center in Kansas City. At the time, I was making a body of work around fake rubber fruits, grapes especially, as I kept finding them in thrift stores—my favorite source of inspiration. I wondered why previous generations were so drawn to these obviously fake, gaudy objects, displaying them on kitchen counters and coffee tables. I started collecting them, and after accumulating about twenty, I strung them together to store in my studio. I then became interested in the clump as a form—evoking a head with drooping locks or a chandelier of sorts—and wanted to hoist them. Considering the trope of being fed grapes by beautiful women (a symbol of luxury, pleasure, indulgence), I envisioned a way for the bundle to be able to be lowered into a viewer’s mouth. Ideally, it would hang from a pulley and be tethered to a wall, forming a sculptural line in space made from individually plucked rubber grapes strung together.

Cross Sections - Solo Exhibition with Tephra ICA

Curatorial statement by Hannah Barco:

In our current cultural moment, decontextualization (sampling, appropriation, misquotation, etc.) is ubiquitous to the point that pulling something out of context barely constitutes an act. As exemplified by the rise of conspiracy theories built from a hodgepodge of “facts” what is at stake in this rampant decontextualization is a shared sense of reality from which governmental and social structures can function. With this crisis of decontextualization as the backdrop to their practice, O’Brien slyly employs and decelerates the process of pulling something out of context. She builds each artwork around a borrowed instructional diagram, which she carefully strips of its original function.

Painstakingly articulated through humble materials such as pink insulation foam, paper mâché, pipe cleaners, and embedded found objects, the resulting wall hung constructions are disconcertainingly familiar yet resist recognition. In each work, O’Brien has tended carefully to the potential connotations of each line, shape, material, and texture, refusing to conform to the usual speed of consumption and the inundation of content that mark our contemporary lives. These works are political in that they challenge us to be critical consumers–to exercise our capacity to decode, to trace origins, to pay attention to how it is all adding up. And we must be diligent, for in each of these works, lies the energy of an imminent break—something that is roiling but withheld, constrained but about to break through.

Excerpt from "In the galleries: Sculptures take us beyond the conventional", review in The Washington Post by Mark Jenkins:

There’s something archaeological about the art of Danni O’Brien and Hae Won Sohn, whose mixed-media sculptures are newly made yet hint at antiquity. The two artists employ such solid materials as stucco and plaster, but softer, more nebulous aspects also characterize the pieces in O’Brien’s “Cross Sections,” at Tephra ICA at Signature, and Sohn’s “Unspoken Volumes,” at the University of Maryland’s Stamp Gallery. The women’s creations are simultaneously fixed and protean.

Diane Arbus was accused of exploiting ‘freaks.’ We misunderstood her art.

O’Brien’s wall sculptures are based on found diagrams from sources as diverse as a plumbing manual or the natural contraception guide that yielded “Homemade Barriers,” an atypical piece with two embedded LEDs. That work is blue and green, but the Baltimore-based artist is more partial to pink or a pinkish tan that resembles rosy shades of marble. Pink is also common in plastic consumer products, which O’Brien incorporates into such assemblages as “Hot Dog Mitosis,” derived from a biological illustration but centered on a dog food bowl. The bowl is one of several recessed forms that give the sculptures both literal and symbolic depth.

The artist showed spindly and seemingly haphazard free-standing sculptures at Pazo Fine Art recently, but this show’s pieces appear more focused and cohesive. Yet O’Brien does often append random objects: A metal cleat is attached to the top of one piece, and another contains a cosmetics organizer filled with shards of a ceramic vessel. The container and the fragments are pink, as is the insulation foam that endows these hard-edge pieces with partial squishiness. Both the color and texture suggest the human body, a work of architecture that’s far more adaptable than a stucco wall or a plastic bowl.

Clog II (Pink)

2021
Media: Found and manipulated diagram from Plumbing (Home Repair and Improvement), vintage plastic cosmetic organizer, shards of a ceramic vessel, ceramic beads, toy wood, grommets, stucco, acrylic paint, pipe cleaners, insulation foam, wood
30 x 22 x 3 in.
Clog I (Yellow)

2021
Media: Found and manipulated diagram from Plumbing (Home Repair and Improvement), insulation foam, wood, vintage plastic cosmetic organizer, silicone mold of beets, dried out clay, hair curlers, rubber dog toy, grommets, stucco, acrylic paint, pipe cleaners
28 x 26 x 4 in.
Prong for Pink Slime

2022
Media: Vintage plastic desktop organizer, hand built ceramics, bendy hair curler, ceramic pepper, paper pulp, insulation foam, wood
21 x 12 x 7 in.
Hot Dog Mitosis

2021
Media: Found and manipulated diagram from Neurosciences the Basics, insulation foam, wood, slow feeder dog bowl, paper pulp, pipe cleaners
19 x 22 x 3 in.
Marble Math II

2021
Media: Found diagram from Fundamentals of Radiology, insulation foam, wood, vintage plastic playing card holder, glazed ceramics, paper pulp, pipe cleaners
26 x 16 x 3 in.
Homemade Barriers

2022
Media: Found diagram from Contraception Naturally!, handheld silicone brush, two silicone reusable baby food bowls, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, two hard wired LED lights, fabric coated electrical cord, insulation foam, wood
80 x 36 x 6 in.
Homemade Barriers (detail)

2022
Media: Found diagram from Contraception Naturally!, handheld silicone brush, two silicone reusable baby food bowls, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, two hard wired LED lights, fabric coated electrical cord, insulation foam, wood
80 x 36 x 6 in.
Stoney Baloney Jewelry Box II

2022
Media: Found and manipulated diagram from The Cell, flocked jewelry box liner, paper pulp, plastic coated electrical wire, battery operated night light, insulation foam, wood
18 x 18 x 4 in.
Stoney Baloney Jewelry Box I

2021
Media: Found and manipulated diagram from The Cell, flocked jewelry box liner, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, hard wired LED light, fabric coated electrical cord, insulation foam, and wood
24 x 16 x 5 in.
Tutorial for a Bruise (homage to Eva Hesse)

2021
Media: Found stitching diagram, insulation foam, wood, handheld silicone brush, plastic tube, boondoggle box chain, paper pulp, stucco, pipe cleaners
32 x 24 x 3.01 in.

Glow Up - Body of Work for Solo Exhibition with Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington

"Danni O’Brien transforms the cast-offs of our middlebrow consumerist landscape into sculptural works that are playful, absurd, and alluring. Through works that are carefully crafted, with bright colors and complex textures, O’Brien takes once-useful materials and elevates them beyond mundane functionality. These new formations express their own aesthetic logic, naturalizing the combination of disparate consumer detritus like night lights, exercise bands, coat racks, and home improvement manuals. While the color schemes and plastic nightlights in Glow Up evoke the material culture of the late 20th century, the video and audio pieces in the show place them solidly in the present moment. In Three Word Mantras, a female voice recites strings of seemingly random text in the style of a daily affirmations app, bringing to mind the wellness influencers who flourish on Instagram and Tik-Tok. Like the plastic it’s constructed from, cultural detritus sticks around, piling on, but never fully replacing, the material that came before it."

--Curatorial statement by Blair Murphy

Dip n Snack Diaphragm (turned off)

2022
Media: Found and manipulated diagram from Contraception Naturally, vintage chip and dip bowl, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, wired light, fabric coated electrical cord, insulation foam, wood
80 x 35 x 6 in.
Dip n Snack Diaphragm (turned on)

2022
Media: Found and manipulated diagram from Contraception Naturally, vintage chip and dip bowl, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, wired light, fabric coated electrical cord, insulation foam, wood
80 x 35 x 6 in.
Home Improvement

2022
Media: Found diagram from Easy Lawns and Gardens, electric candle night light, fabric coated electrical cord, plastic tube, brick, paper pulp, wood
70 x 30 x 14 in.
Home Improvement (detail)

2022
Media: Found diagram from Easy Lawns and Gardens, electric candle night light, fabric coated electrical cord, plastic tube, brick, paper pulp, wood
70 x 30 x 14 in.
Ode to Ivory I & II (install shot)

2022
Media: Found and manipulated diagrams from Time Life Home Repair and Improvement Series book The Old House, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, vintage Christmas night lights, silicone dipped bulb, fabric coated electrical cord, insulation foam, wood
80 x 96 x 14 in.
Ode to Ivory I & II (detail)

2022
Media: Found and manipulated diagrams from Time Life Home Repair and Improvement Series book The Old House, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, vintage Christmas night lights, silicone dipped bulb, fabric coated electrical cord, insulation foam, wood
80 x 96 x 14 in.
Late Bloomer

2022
Media: Garden Grabber Pro rake, back massaging wand, two dried gourds, rung of woven metal fence, coat rack, three wooden beads, plastic shoe horn, stone watermelon paperweight, rubber gaskets, hand built ceramic, wired candelabra light, silicone dipped bulb, bag clip, fabric coated electrical cord, paper pulp, flocking, paint
96 x 60 x 30 in.
Late Bloomer (detail)

2022
Media: Garden Grabber Pro rake, back massaging wand, two dried gourds, rung of woven metal fence, coat rack, three wooden beads, plastic shoe horn, stone watermelon paperweight, rubber gaskets, hand built ceramic, wired candelabra light, silicone dipped bulb, bag clip, fabric coated electrical cord, paper pulp, flocking, paint
96 x 60 x 30 in.
Tick Tock Totem

2022
Media: Umbrella stand, lava lamp, sand art from the 2000s, two board game hourglasses, crystal bottle stopper, flickering night lights, hand built ceramics, ankle exercise band, paper pulp, sand
60 x 30 x 24 in.
Tick Tock Totem (detail)

2022
Media: Umbrella stand, lava lamp, sand art from the 2000s, two board game hourglasses, crystal bottle stopper, flickering night lights, hand built ceramics, ankle exercise band, paper pulp, sand
60 x 30 x 24 in.

How to Shrimp Cocktail - Solo Exhibition with Towson University Holtzman Gallery

How to Shrimp Cocktail, an installation by Danni O’Brien, is comprised of 20 works completed in 2021 rooted in irreverence, queerness, and absurdity. A dog bowl designed to train pets to eat more slowly is shoved into an abstracted diagram from a vintage biology book, coated in hot dog colored matter. A funeral wreath stand suspends a baby rocker wearing styrofoam peppers as horns and thorns while sporting a pleather purse handle and choker necklace as a harness. A lilac leather bike seat anchors a bobbing, leaning, nodding candle night light emerging from a pile of coat racks and organizational accouterment.

In How to Shrimp Cocktail, O’Brien dispenses free-standing sculptures and wall-based relief objects that seem dually playful and unnerving, purposeful and pathetic. Mixed media life-size sculptures have material laundry lists that are delicately balanced and coated in a paper pulp membrane. Devised and stabilized primarily from the excess of societal detritus she collects, each sculpture is inherently unstable and precarious, calling to mind the haphazard navigation of capitalism. Lurking behind and between sculptures are relief, tablet-like, relics. These objects are formed by carving foam and applying a mosaicked varnish of material, primarily paper pulp and stucco, to create a grout that situates and shelters a series of suspended found objects. Pipe cleaners, glass beads, and caulk saver find homes in the valleys of the carved lines. The subjects of these drawings are a range of subtracted, spliced, and decontextualized diagrams from an array of how-to manuals, DIY books, and outdated science texts, collected from the overflowing shelves at thrift stores. By transforming obsolete, once informative illustrations into an abstract network of undulating lines, the work maintains a sense of potential or instructional power. As viewers move throughout the gallery, the reliefs on the walls become a legend or map to navigate the sculptural work in the space.

How to Shrimp Cocktail Installation View I
How to Shrimp Cocktail Installation View II
Horny Thorny Baby II Installation View
Horny Thorny Baby I Installation View

Funeral wreath stand, found baby rocker, four Styrofoam peppers, hand-built ceramics, hematite stone bead, 90s choker, doll stand, speaker stand pipe, pleather purse handle, wire, paper pulp, epoxy clay, spray paint
Stitching Stones

Found stitching diagram, insulation foam, wood, poly foam caulk saver, hematite beads, glass beads, paper pulp, pipe cleaners
A Poke a Prod a Carrot a Nod

A coat rack, hat rack, jewelry organizer, found ceramic carrots, bike seat, hand-built ceramic, paper pulp, electric candle light
Steady

Found diagram from The Library of Boating, insulation foam, wood, stucco patch, plaster, acrylic paint, pipe cleaners, galvanized marine cleat
H

H gas grill burner, insulation foam, wood, wine cork, jewelry stand, leather and chain belt from my middle school wardrobe, paper pulp
Support for Peas After a Long Day of Play (Fruit Basket Edition)

Metal chair backrest, electric towel warmer feet, legs of an American girl doll desk, plumbing pipe and fixtures, reflective driveway marker, suede tassel, rabbit fur pelt from a 1950s coat, boondoggle box chains, ceramic casts of children’s plastic play peas, produce washing basket, hand-built ceramics, paper pulp
Marble Math I

Found diagram from DNA Chromatic and Chromosomes, insulation foam, wood, vintage sewing caddy insert, inside out rubber skeleton fingers, hardware, chain, caulk remnant from a kitchen I remodeled in 2015, shards of iridescent glass, upholstery tacks, stucco, joint compound

Tongue Puddles - Solo Exhibition with School 33 Project Space

My words:

In tongue Puddles, I populate the Project Space at School 33 with an ensemble of hard and soft objects suggestive of jewelry, flora, playground equipment, and road sings to form a frolicsome and unabashedly feminine installation. Central to this installation is latch hook rug making, a kitschy and nostaligc craft technique I learned in my youth, with which I build fuzzy, fibrous "paintings" of abstracted motifs from my adolescent girlhood. I employ this process to grapple with notions of feminininty, domesticity, and craft, also exploring the material's redolent and tactile qualities. In conjuction with the latch hooked skins, I construct and situate twisitng, bulbous forms from found objects, wood, and cardboard, coated in paper pulp and suspended and adorned by glazed ceramic hardware and freckles. The resulting series of cheeky, off kilter objects forms an immersive installation that encourages touch and play.

Other people's words:

http://www.bmoreart.com/2019/05/friday-gallery-roundup-school-33-edition.html

Rebeka Kirkman of Bmore Art writes:

"A large set of lungs suspended midair within this lilac room gave my heart a flutter as I glimpsed it walking up the stairs. The room glows against its surroundings like a screen or a sunny day filtering into a room through a skylight. Like everything else within Danni O’Brien’s installation in School 33’s project space, the lungs are not exactly what I read them as at first—there’s an almost-recognition of shape, scale, and color in that ovoid pair, blanketed by peach and pink hooked yarn, with tubes and artery-like wires spiraling around the edges. Elsewhere, O’Brien’s playful sculptures encourage my free association with kids’ drawings, Dr. Seuss, IKEA’s Småland, a Winnie the Pooh hooked rug project kit my Aunt Cindy gave me that I never finished as a child, and so on.

This surreal but intentional playground is silly and exciting, calling back to the freewheelin’ days of childhood arts and crafts, but with the artist’s more studious eye for pattern, form, and craftsmanship, and an underlying association with the domestic space. The experimental sculptures direct an interesting little dance of logic for a viewer; I’ll assert this peachy, lumpy structure leaning against a wall with a small hooked rug winding in and out of its intestine-like rungs, is a towel rack, rethought—but it’s also really not that, this creature-form with rosettes stuffed into its pipe-like ends.

The hand-wrought textures of these pieces make it seem like beneath the pulpy outer layer lies an armature of bone, capillaries, tissue, and tendons—they feel very much alive, though frozen mid-movement. In the middle of the room a green stalk, like a hat-rack or a headless sunflower whose arms reach out of their own volition, undirected by the sun, is poised on a pink platform whose misshapen three legs provide both necessary and vestigial structural support. A mirror mostly concealed by yogurt-colored yarn blobs and thin, dangly tongues allows my brain’s insistence that that pink platform is a radiator and we’re all just wandering here, inside of a baby brain’s interpretation of a bathroom.

These kinds of associative, childlike logical leaps mirror the artist’s search within colorful abstractions and familiar, domestic-crafty textures. A tall contraption of highlighter-yellow tubing and weightless nylon elements conjures for me some kind of home-exercise gym, of the kind a kid would dream up and, trusting bravely in their design, build out of whatever’s available."

Tongue Puddles
Squirm
Bam
Tale of a Tendril
Highlight Me
Highlight Me
Ceramic Hardware
Raindrops on Roses

Play Date - Solo Exhibition with Hillyer Art Center

My words:

“Play Date” explores childhood landscapes through camp, craft, and humor. The immersive set of candy colored, fuzztastic objects echo forms of both playground equipment and O’Brien’s memory of her own awkward, pubescent body. Plush “paintings” and skins emerge from the nostalgic and kitschy process of latch hook rug making. This technique is employed as a vehicle to grapple with notions of femininity, domesticity, and craft, as well as for its titillating and tactile physical qualities.

Other people's words:

https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/arts/museums-galleries/blog/21043479/samantha-sethi-salvatore-pirrone-and-danni-obrien-at-iaa-at-hillyer-reviewed

John Anderson of Washington City Paper writes:

"In Play Date, the most outright striking of the three exhibitions, Baltimore-based artist Danni O’Brien overwhelms the senses with organic and colorful work. Using a process of latch hook rug-making—essentially, threading and knotting short fibers through a stiff matrix—her playful compositions seem sculptural and painterly. The composition is bold: They appear like enlarged doodles. Meanwhile, O’Brien’s high-key color palette, crossed with the physical texture of her materials—mostly wool and dollar store plastic rope—makes the works feel like Méret Oppenheim tripping on acid.

The individual works of Play Date support the exhibition’s overall titular theme, with titles like “Swing,” “Bare Foot,” and “Slumber Party.” Those titles aren’t terribly literal. Presumably, most come from Rorschach-like free-association. For instance, “Bare Foot” which is a fuzzy peach blob framing numerous dark star-like shapes, leans against a wall, on a peach-colored form that looks like a misshapen radiator. “Swing” gets closer to the literal: The cloud-like blob of pink and peach, bisected by a jagged line of gray, seems unlike the seat of a swing, but it does appear to be suspended on the wall by dangling yellow ropes. It’s like a swing in free-fall after its rider has jumped off. O’Brien’s most visibly illustrative work has perhaps the most abstract of titles; “a Bloop and a Blast” displays two ceramic hands connected by a single fuzzy arm on a green shelf, like a field. A latch hook cloud swirls above the disembodied hands, illustrating baseball gloves and bats, dancing in a field on a bright blue day.

The individual works of Play Date support the exhibition’s overall titular theme, with titles like “Swing,” “Bare Foot,” and “Slumber Party.” Those titles aren’t terribly literal. Presumably, most come from Rorschach-like free-association. For instance, “Bare Foot” which is a fuzzy peach blob framing numerous dark star-like shapes, leans against a wall, on a peach-colored form that looks like a misshapen radiator. “Swing” gets closer to the literal: The cloud-like blob of pink and peach, bisected by a jagged line of gray, seems unlike the seat of a swing, but it does appear to be suspended on the wall by dangling yellow ropes. It’s like a swing in free-fall after its rider has jumped off. O’Brien’s most visibly illustrative work has perhaps the most abstract of titles; “a Bloop and a Blast” displays two ceramic hands connected by a single fuzzy arm on a green shelf, like a field. A latch hook cloud swirls above the disembodied hands, illustrating baseball gloves and bats, dancing in a field on a bright blue day."