John O’Connor’s work on view at Bannister Gallery

“John O’Connor presents a group of large drawings, a series of smaller text-based paintings on panel, and several free-standing sculptures. This exhibition, facilitated by Professor Richard Whitten, focuses primarily on O’Connor’s large-scale, labor-intensive works on paper. In these drawings, O’Connor transforms disparate forms of information and data through idiosyncratic processes, creating equally idiosyncratic abstract shapes, forms, patterns, and text. His drawings evolve incrementally over long spans of time, as O’Connor absorbs, plots, and transforms information into vibrantly colored pieces that straddle an aesthetic line between diagrams and fully articulated structures, forms, and spaces. O’Connor utilizes text in myriad ways, both in form and function: from jotting down miniscule process notes to rendering visually complex cursive and block letters in his own invented fonts. Conceptually, O’Connor’s works attempt to give visual form to those fraught moments when an individual’s internal intentions and desires are affected, opposed, or concretely influenced by a more powerful natural, political, or psychological force.”