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wall works, I borrow, splice, decontextualize, and re-present diagrams from an array of how-to manuals, DIY books, and outdated science texts, collected from the overflowing shelves at thrift stores.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.