David O'Brien

David O'Brien says of his current works:
In ruins, man-made materials take on a new life that can offer a different perspective apart from the order and structure we bring to everyday culture. Engineered objects degrade, fall apart, and “fall out” of their proper position in the world and begin to co-mingle with nature. Ruins signify a return to geologic time for matter that was for a moment swept up in human symbolic culture. They re-contextualize our relationship with the objects we make, whether they were once precious or used quickly and thoughtlessly tossed away. There is poetry to be found in this dimension of the slow, patient forces at work within all matter -- a temporal matrix into which our own bodies are also inextricably woven. My work is an attempt to bear witness and document these material transformations as they evolve.

The co-mingling of natural and synthetic matter exists nearly everywhere you look, especially if you stop and look down. This specific series of disc paintings are formal photographic studies of the ground at selected sites. The works themselves are made with multiple layers of acrylic paint laid down using silkscreens. Each disc holds its visual contents like a petri dish or the oculus of a telescope. The material interactions within each “view” are the object of careful scrutiny just as much as they are vehicles of open-ended speculation and metaphor.

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