“The Reward“ is the first major institutional UK show by London-based artist Jack O’Brien (b. 1993). O’Brien, recipient of the 2023 Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Prize at Frieze, will present an ambitious new installation responsive to the architecture and structure of Gallery Three.
Central to the exhibition is a newly commissioned work: a major spatial intervention, comprised of two suspended, steel exterior staircases, reminiscent of those once seen in areas of South London—where the artist resides—prior to urban redevelopment schemes. The staircases feature chrome ball punctuations and are wrapped in a skin-like fabric reminiscent of building hoardings. Using the structure of the existing window design, a large scale, system of holes and vents will create an adjoining light installation. The Victorian-style decorative panes and arches of the gallery space—now abstracted and obscured—further complicating how natural light moves in and about the gallery.
The intervention introduces a rippling that cuts through order and the presupposed conditions of how material, weight, and shape present within the spatial dynamics of the gallery. In this rippling, the viewer is directed to consider the work far beyond its material or architectural constraints. Objects show glimpses of previous lives. Familiar gestures are rooted in everyday experiences but altered with the slightest of motions—a staircase is turned onto its side and sheathed in a “hermetic sealing” of industrial stockinette.
O’Brien’s objects carry a sharp charge of tension and imbrication that the audience is invited to situate themselves in the midst of. Crowbars, aluminium pipes, balls, and holes all exist as sites where information and gestures are consolidated. Paired with his long-standing investment in ‘linguistic structures,’ his figurations achieve a poetic register that plays on motifs of music and language to an unsettling yet heady effect. Across his practice, works are imbued with a rhythmic presence. Sculptures swell with volume and serve as repositories for overlapping and repeating aural gestures. Repetitions, pauses, intonations and elongations—all of which are facets that play into the creation of these tonal structures—find their manifestation in the inanimate device.
The works invoke a direct and potent relationship to the body. Articulations of desire, restraint, and the linkages between them are cast in a new light through O’Brien’s considered usage of materiality and form. His objects, sheathed and wrapped in flesh-like membranes, embody a physicality that both inhabits and disrupts the architectural spaces they exist in. Amid their presence, a “corporeal identification” takes place that extends into and expands beyond the surrounding environment.
A new essay by Dominic Johnson is published in the latest edition of Camden Art Centre’s long-running File Note series, produced for every exhibition, it represents an important strand of the organisation’s programme, enabling the commission of a new piece of long-form writing accompanied by a reading/listening/watching list compiled by the artist. They are an accessible resource, available in the galleries for a small charge and online for free.
at Camden Arts Center, London
until December 29, 2024