Lauren O'Connell

Art Critical of Social Reality (Exhibition: Language in Times of Miscommunication)

Language in Times of Miscommunication features artwork that incorporates various forms of language (poetry, speculative fiction, and slang), modes of communication (propaganda, protest, social media, and advertising), and research materials (archives, political documents, and the news) that together form a timely exchange about the slippery relationship between opinion, fact, and fiction, within the construct of our collective reality. Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, argues that homo sapiens surpassed other species by creating complex languages, giving them the ability to articulate “things that exist purely in [the] imagination, such as gods, states, money, and human rights.” Over thousands of years of social evolution, human perception actualized these fictions as core principles of civilization, reinforcing imagined hierarchies of power and influence. By examining past events and current actions through art that is critical of social reality, we can begin to reveal the fictions that have informed society as we know it. While this line of inquiry resonates globally, Language in Times of Miscommunication focuses on the United States to consider how the nation’s polemic atmosphere and increasingly divided reality is information by the redefinition of truth (a reality that is possibly outside of human comprehension) as that which upholds personal ideology. Removed from the constraints of social agreement and systems of belief, as proposed by Trinh T. Minh-Ha in her book When the Moon Waxes Red, art critical of social reality can critique and deconstruct social norms by offering divergent perspectives. “To disrupt the existing systems of dominant values,” Trinh T. Minh-Ha writes, we must “see through the revolving door of all rationalizations” and “meet head on the truth of that struggle between fictions.” From this position, contemporary art can critically analyze how divisive language and alternative narratives have unraveled U.S. society since 2016—a year that marked a shift in acknowledging the fallibility of communication.

Craft and Empowerment (Exhibition: Diedrick Brackens: ark of bulrushes)

Known for making colorful textiles about African American and queer histories, Diedrick Brackens has developed a process of combining yarn's tactility with a storytelling ethos. The patterns used in the works for ark of bulrushes are inspired by two sources for navigation—19th-century Freedom Quilts and star constellations seen from the Northern Hemisphere. Squared with coded patterns, Freedom Quilts were hung in cabin windows to communicate with enslaved peoples traveling north along the Underground Railroad. Historians and academics have found little evidence to support claims of the Freedom Quilts, and thus the stories have been relegated to the space of legend. Real or not, Brackens uses the coded patterns in his weavings to preserve the myth and acknowledges the power of the quilts to inspire hope and perseverance. The central focus of Brackens’ artwork always comes back to the Black body represented in form or implied in absence. This series highlights several kinds of bodies—human, community, animal, celestial, and environmental (sky, land, and water). Each body has a history of being simultaneously revered as sacred and exploited, resulting in tensions translating to the current social unrest over racial and economic inequalities. In this way, tension motivates progress. The craft of weaving requires tension as a foundation for which to work against in order to piece together the loose yarn. With each pass of the shuttle—placing one weft of yarn between the tensioned warp threads—and each pull of the reed—combing the yarn into place—each distinct line of texture and color is united as one. Through the process of weaving, tension can be seen as a metaphorical source of coming together and healing.

Architecture, Performance Art, and Preservation (MA Thesis)

From late 1975 until his death in 2009, the San Francisco-based artist David Ireland acted out a distinctive artistic philosophy that engaged common tasks and materials in the everyday space of his home at 500 Capp Street, a Victorian house on the corner of Capp and 20th Streets in San Francisco’s Mission District. Known as a Bay Area sculptor and conceptual artist, and recognized for his experimentation with materials, Ireland’s most overlooked medium was perhaps his house. Through several task-oriented actions and unconventional gestures, which I postulate as maintenance and preservation, Ireland engaged with the house in a distinct and sequential order. A study of the archive at 500 Capp Street proves that the house was no idiosyncratic or peripheral activity, but rather a central one that offered a platform for an extensive system for his artistic concerns of process and performance, as well as their material evidence. This system serves as an index of Ireland’s interaction with his house and is characterized by an ongoing symbiotic relationship between the architecture of a home and the events played out within it. The house, a stationary object, acts as the connective source for Ireland’s work, a place where the artist experimented with everyday labor activities, which accentuated the effects of time on a building through preservation, and challenged the status of the autonomous art object, making visible a complex matrix of relationships.