Home Studio | John O’Connor
Right:
“Hitchcock’s Rope”
2018
Graphite and colored pencil on paper
48.75 x 36.75 inches
“In this drawing, I was interested in exploring my personal sense of time, and how it relates to ‘real’ time. I was thinking about how Hitchcock played with our perceptions of time in Rope. In this film, the skyline light fades more quickly than in real life but, as viewers, we attribute real time to the coming of night. We therefore experience time as passing more slowly that it does in the film. The concept of ‘mind time’ has always fascinated me – how we sense when to wake up, how we unconsciously read the visual stimuli around us as temporal context, how the physical world affects our sense of what time it is. I’ve also been long interested in self experimentation, so for this drawing I decided to test my own perceptions of time: At various points over the course of several weeks, I attempted to guess the ‘correct’ time. I then noted this guess in the drawing and compared it against the actual time of my studio clock. I used the difference – the time error – to mark points on a grid I had drawn over much of the paper – minutes off of the real time translated into spaces between colored diamonds. My timed guesses and resulting differences are noted around the drawing. If I guessed before or after the actual time, I made a pattern on the grid (the concentric circles and shapes) in a warm or cool color. I continued this in a clockwise motion from the center outward, until the shapes began to intersect with the noted times. I then connected these patterns and developed the form more fully. The movements of the external shapes and arrows are counterclockwise. The whole piece is a time machine based on my temporal fallibility.” (O’Connor)
Left:
DETAIL: “Hitchcock’s Rope”
2018
Graphite and colored pencil on paper
48.75 x 36.75 inches
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Right:
DETAIL: “Hitchcock’s Rope”
2018
Graphite and colored pencil on paper
48.75 x 36.75 inches
Inquire
Right:
“Lenny”
2020
Graphite and colored pencil on paper
69 x 39.5 inches
“This drawing is an offshoot of the Butterfly works. Lenny was a character in one – the kitchen boss in a hospital. I actually knew a Lenny, who was my real-life boss at the Noble Hospital kitchen in Westfield, MA. He always played the lottery. In this drawing I was interested in the ways in which kids learn about how society operates through word-based math problems. My son, who is 9 years old, often brings home these types of problems, which are really convoluted and stretch their narratives to fit the mathematical problems being studied. Because of this, the problem’s stories are often based in everyday life but are very elaborately concocted. In addition, these math problems presume a form of moral behavior based of fairness and equality, usually through the capitalist exchange of money and goods.” (O’Connor)
Right:
DETAIL: “Lenny”
2020
Graphite and colored pencil on paper
69 x 39.5 inches
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Left:
DETAIL: “Lenny”
2020
Graphite and colored pencil on paper
69 x 39.5 inches
Inquire
Right:
“Conspiracy Shape”
2018
Graphite and colored pencil on paper
69.5 x 49.5 inches
“I’m interested in how false information, specifically vast conspiracy theories, are communicated in ways that cause people (sometimes ourselves) to believe that they are true. These intellectual beliefs then cause us to act physically – where we live, how we eat, crimes we might commit, etc. Like how the pizza gate believer actually showed up at the restaurant with a gun! For me, this drawing maps the language of conspiracy theories and connects their words into a shape that gives visual form to the phenomenon of belief. If we do not experience something directly, how do we come to believe it’s true? The way these conspiratorial ideas (usually of power structures) are encoded in the substance of their language unlocks our receptiveness to them. I think they speak to the instinctive or animal side of human beings and attempt to satisfy our need to know how the world / universe works. Like how a key’s shape fits into a lock – the various points (words) used in conspiracy theory’s ideas are formed in a way to ‘fit’ with our instinctive need to know and believe, much in the way religion does.” (O’Connor)
Above: DETAIL: “Conspiracy Shape,” 2018, Graphite and colored pencil on paper, 69.5 x 49.5 inches Inquire
Left:
“A Good Idea ”
2008
Graphite and colored pencil on paper
78.5 x 78.5 inches
“This work was my attempt to connect patterns of the past, present and future. I began with past disasters, connected them to current events, famous speeches, technological innovations, etc., and ended with predictions of the future. I tried to connect the information via the language that was used to describe the event – the last word or letter of a disaster from 1951 led me to the first word of another disaster from 1981.” (O’Connor)
John J. O’Connor was born in Westfield, MA and received an MFA in painting and an MS in Art History and Criticism from Pratt Institute in 2000. He attended The MacDowell Colony, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, was a recipient of New York Foundation for the Arts Grants in Painting and Drawing, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Studio residency. John has been in numerous exhibitions abroad, including The Lab (Ireland), Martin Asbaek Gallery (Denmark), Neue Berliner Raume (Germany), Rodolphe Janssen Gallery (Brussels), the Louhu District Art Museum (Shenzhen, China), TW Fine Art (Australia); and in the US at Andrea Rosen Gallery, Pierogi Gallery, Arkansas Arts Center, Weatherspoon Museum, Ronald Feldman Gallery, Marlborough Gallery, White Columns, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Baltimore, the Queens Museum, and the Tang Museum. His exhibitions have been reviewed in Bomb Magazine, The New York Times, Artforum, the Village Voice, Art Papers, the Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America. John presented his work in discussion with Fred Tomaselli at The New Museum, and his work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Weatherspoon Museum, Hood Museum, Southern Methodist University, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. A catalogue spanning 10 years of John’s work was published by Pierogi Gallery with essays by Robert Storr, John Yau, and Rick Moody. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.