Curatorial statement by Blair Murphy:

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.

My words:

A hauntingly tall, wobbly night light is erected precariously. It has the potential to sway and fall over at any given moment. It lights up only the ceiling, illuminating an entirely useless place. Instead of providing a source of light to warn us of things we may bump into, it becomes the very thing we may bump into. It is an object that actively misbehaves.

Queer in their irreverence, compilation of connoted material, and otherworldly affect, the works in this exhibition grapple with mending, conspicuous consumption, and the lives of our old nightlights. Fascinated by societal and consumerist detritus and how and when we decide to collect and abandon stuff, I scavenge found, discarded objects and allow their raw forms to direct my practice, considering a dystopian future where these are my only accessible materials. Through tinkering, playing, and mending, I deconstruct the skeletons of household organizers, coat racks, lawn furniture, home exercise equipment, and other found domestic memorabilia, and graft them into cheeky, off kilter sculptures with kneaded paper pulp membranes. This mending serves as an act of care and sentimentality for the objects I have collected and moreover, provides a framework to frugally navigate and survive our capitalistic context.

In the relief wall works, I borrow, splice, decontextualize, and re-present diagrams from an array of how-to manuals, DIY books, and outdated science texts, collected from the overflowing shelves at thrift stores. These obsolete diagrams lurk in between jaundiced pages at only a few inches tall and wide but are blown up a hundred times and reimagined as quasi-informative, monumental, tablet-like relics. Evoking humble materials, the works are constructed with a reverence for low brow, craft, and home improvement materials. They are coated in membranes of hand mushed, pushed, and massaged paper pulp, while pipe cleaners are shoved into their carved lines. Nestled in these curios are a collection of found plastic material such as a vintage dip and chip bowl, a flocked jewelry box insert, and ivory colored plug-in holiday candle lights. By repositioning and reimagining common plastic objects from the domestic landscape, I propose a future constructed from plastic, the stuff of the mid-20th century’s futuristic fantasies, loosened from its context and free of its less desirable associations.

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.

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.

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."

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."

A life-size, undulating soft sculpture, Fruit Stripe, is juxtaposed alongside a traditionally lying hand tied rug, Garden Party, to expose the ways in which I challenge the traditional craft of hand tied latch hooking in material form, and concept. Each makes use of wool yarn and collected plastic rope stripped into shreds. In Fruit Stripe, I marry hard acrylic plexiglass turned into finger like beads with the soft protrusions of the yarn from the mesh substrate it is birthed from. The two objects create a landscape that encourages intimate exploration and investigation. 

These works were curated by Blair Murphy into Over, Under, Forward, Back at Arlington Art Center. This group show revolved around contemporary fiber artists who both employ and challenge traditional notions of craft and fiber art.