Ironically, what Mandelbrot saw that day merely confirmed his notion that chaos and order are two sides of the same coin. Similarly, artist John O’Connor, whose latest show recently opened at Pierogi Gallery, seems aware that his quasi-scientific works are imbued with a hidden pattern.

By approaching everyday phenomena like the lottery; meta-dieting, computer-generated conversations and psychopathic traits, the artist has managed to unlock something of a veiled thread that shows humans to be simultaneously rational, superstitious, and abundantly absurd. Moreover, The Machine and the Ghost evokes a deep sense of alienation at O’Connor’s core.

Works in this show fit neither traditional science nor machine-like concision, but rather a hand-made aesthetic that is imprecise, but never sloppy. The artist begins each composition with an equation entirely of his own making, charting coordinates based in point, line, shape and color. When fully mapped out, they generate strange optical patterns which seem to confirm a secret knowledge at the heart of the mundane.

Take Self Portrait with Sunspots for example. The composite features a series of nine framed pictures of the artist’s face with photonegative captures of the sun’s daily spots superimposed over his skin. A subtle politic might be that the sunspots look like legions in this context. Though more interesting, perhaps, is the raw emotional content behind O’Connor’s various hairstyles here. A mussed tousle one day, an almost violently-shaved stubble the next, and a complete cover-up with ski cap by the end. It is as if the artist’s identity crisis somehow coheres with the ecstasy and agony of the sun’s harsh unpredictability.

The Shape of War, one of three sculptures in the show, operates less like traditional sculpture and more like a diorama that one could imagine Copernicus constructing in his laboratory as a means of measuring some new hypothesis. The hand-drawn texts and jagged shapes here are merely plotted based on a system set up long before the aesthetics emerge. Any onerous thoughts concerning the topic of war practically disappear, as the suspended sculpture’s framework appears both impersonal and utterly weightless.

Monster, 1992-2002 is a large-scale facial photograph collaged over with what looks like a rainbow-colored spider web masking the artist’s face. Basing the color and pattern on a pre-set equation where a sub-70°F day is plotted red and a plus-85° day is green, the work clearly acknowledges the human subservience of mood-to-weather conditions. Yet, never obvious, the Kafka-esque monstrosity that O’Connor’s face metamorphoses into becomes strangely moving, its beauty a kind of impassioned loneliness that easily disturbs.

Conversely, Portrait of a Psychopath, the show’s largest composition, is sobering to its very core. In the center, a psychedelic green, pink, and yellow mountain emerges from the plotted coordinates that match lists of figures like Odysseus, Pol Pot, and Ronald Reagan on the right, against a series of phrases to the left side such as, “Warlike courage far above norm” and, “Skill at faking emotions including love, sincerity, and regret.” The sheer verticality of the mountain gives it a monumental feel amidst the rest of the show, and a neo-liberal interpretation may be fully in line with its op-art construct. Yet there remains a shocking element here that defies politics. For surely one could expect a contemporary work based in war and corruption to have something of a mannerist irrationality. Yet, the way the composition remains resolutely composed is perhaps its most disturbing and lasting quality. Instead of pointing fingers, O’Connor seems to suggest that given the same power, each of us could become such a monster.

A 75”x60” work titled Butterfly is almost too much to grasp in one viewing. It is a text painting, but not the usual spatial affair the genre seems to imply. O’Connor instead stacks a dizzying array of hand-drawn sentences punctuated by brand logos which he employs in the telling of a single day begun by chasing an Ambien capsule with a bottle of Budweiser.

The narrator (whom we assume is O’Connor) then heads off to the Truth Gentleman’s Club where, in an extreme burst of physical and mental energy, there are several fast-food pit-stops, more prescription drug intake (Prozac, Ativan), an attempted mugging and finally, overwhelmingly, a great crash unto sleep. The viewer is left to wonder whether any of it really happened or if it was entirely dreamed. As such, the yarn becomes something of a waking nightmare, whose surrealist tropes blend uneasily with the barrage of consumer products to create a composite that is unapologetically neurotic.

In the end, the great strength of The Machine and the Ghost remains its utter lack of artificiality, despite the detached nature of its equations and the strange biomorphic patterns they produce. That such visual chaos can be both breathtakingly beautiful and endlessly hypnotic makes a very solid argument for the most basic act of stepping back from life’s messy details as a means of reinstating order and civility.

By Brian Chidester

The post The Machine and the Ghost: John O’Connor at Pierogi Gallery appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

–Jean-Luc Godard, “Changer d’image”

In a video commissioned for French television in 1982, whose narration is quoted above in translation, Godard wrestles with the question of whether and how images can resist commodification.  The exhibition that joins works by Linda Francis, John O’Connor, and Ken Weathersby similarly makes me think about how artists can have a critical relationship to the near-omnipresent forces of the commodity market, in a culture of capital that has expanded even further over the past few decades.  The artworks here provoke questions about the flow of capital exchange that seems to saturate every aspect of our lives.

Fluidity, flexibility: oft-cited keywords of the transnational corporate economy, which penetrates public space and institutions through privatization, and personal experience through digital information technology.  The mobile realm of production contracts labor wherever profit is greatest, while the deregulated financial industry increasingly speculates on the flow of symbolic capital itself.  Smooth operation is ostensibly the order of the day.

Placing high stakes, making hearts ache / He’s loved in seven languages / Diamond nights and ruby lights, high in the sky / Heaven help him, when he falls

–Sade, “Smooth Operator”

Linda Francis’s recent work is based on electron-microscope images of the surface of a failed heat shield of a 1990s space shuttle, images that she overlays repeatedly on the computer.  Her pieces present technological visualizations of physical structure—a structure designed, unsuccessfully, to harness resistance.  The artworks also incorporate into the imagery evidence of the media that produce them, such as pixelation.

Linda Francis, We Can Build You, 2013 Oil on wooden panel, 38 x 95 in.

In Interference, the crystalline components arrayed within the image suggest patterned organization while eluding it.  Yet across the multiple silkscreened prints assembled in the piece, repetition and alignment at the edges structure the image. Thus pattern recognition in Interference is both fugitive and precise.  Indeed a strong diagonal current crosses a literal gap to a separate, larger panel that leans on the floor against the wall.  Shifts in scale and near-repetitions are vertiginous.

Also patternlike but dizzyingly evasive, We Can Build You is a more physically factured, painted version of the image at greater magnification.  It resembles representations of biological code, and its title (taken from the Phillip K. Dick novel) evokes the manipulations of biotechnology, and more generally the way technological capitalism works on us.  Francis’s pieces invite contemplation of hypermediation and replication, as well as contingency, fissure, and friction, with a coolly observant gaze.

John O’Connor also indexes research material in his drawings, which underscore the imbrication of psychological experience with an information economy.  As the Surrealists channeled the illogical logic of the unconscious, O’Connor cultivates delirious overloads of information processing.  He produces drawings by using shifting, idiosyncratic codes: converting text into numbers, reversing letters, translating letters into colors by randomly devised systems, running garbled text through an electronic dictionary.

Turing (named for the computer scientist and his famous test of whether machines can think) presents an oval loop of linked bits of textual data.  The loop surrounds a set of inwardly folding, bunching shapes that evoke an organism introjecting and expelling.  O’Connor generated the incomprehensible data by a dialogue between his free associations, processed through multiple overcodings, and an electronic dictionary’s responses (one of which eerily speaks to Alan Turing’s persecution for his sexuality).  Characteristic of the artist’s work, the drawing appears both diagrammatic and indecipherable.

In SUSEJ, a drawing of intricately colored grids, O’Connor includes notations of his text-to-color coding at the paper’s edges.  The piece invites us to comprehend the design of the delicate arrangement of colors, but its structuring principles are opaque.  Similarly, the thin, almost weightless sculptures Future Rods are covered in blocky text concerning prediction, which resists deciphering.  Obtruding on the gallery floor, they evoke the forces of futures speculation that invest contemporary life.

O’Connor’s artistic practice mines the extra-aesthetic, representing processed information from the provinces of socioeconomics, politics, science, mass culture, and personal life.  His work does not so much assimilate these realms into absorbable images, but rather creates incongruity, discordance, uncanny disconcertment.

John O’Conner, SUSEJ, 2011. Colored pencil on graph paper, 43 x 25 in.

Ken Weathersby, 197 (dcch),
 2012. 
Acrylic & graphite, linen, wood
. 25 x 15 in.

In 198 (dc), paint is applied to a wood support, but that substrate is also image: it’s an elaborate grid of layered wood strips, which cutouts in the painted front surface reveal from the picture plane.  Meanwhile the painted image, an optically active grid of black and white squares, is a material slab of acrylic film directly glued to the wood.  The resemblance of the grids, and the equivocation of figure and ground at the level of image and physical material, confound distinctions between structure and surface.

In the freestanding 194 (z), another painted grid of tiny squares echoes a larger grid of wood strips that supports the painting.  In this piece, the wood strips enclose the painting, holding it within.  The structure is a delicate cage that partially obscures the painting, here in its conventional form of acrylic on a rectangle of fabric over stretcher bars.  Planar yet viewable in the round, the hybrid 194 (z) presents us with ambiguity about what is supportive structure and what is visual display.

Weathersby’s work foregrounds how the realms of visual image and material production are implicated with each other.  It is as though painting is posing questions about its constituent terms.  In 197 (dcch), what looks like a painting—a thin plane of an optically active grid of colors—is dissected to present a literal, physical interior that contains overlapping parts of other gridded paintings and wooden grids.  The piece highlights a sense of imbrication and conditionality.

Interestingly, the container is also a key figure in contemporary economics; the container ship is pivotal to global exchange, as it’s designed to make the supply chain as smooth as possible.  Indeed, as the forces of transnational capitalism are ever more pervasive, they operate largely below the threshold of perceptibility.  The artwork of Weathersby, Francis, and O’Connor each raises issues of imbrication, of congruence and incongruity.  It resonates keenly with the extra-artistic socioeconomic situation, and its discontents.

by Michele Alpern

The post Linda Francis, John O’Connor, and Ken Weathersby at Suite 217 appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.