Danni O’brien

Bio

Danni O’Brien (b.1992) is an interdisciplinary artist based in the Mid-Atlantic. Her artistic practice is rooted in environmentalism, nostalgia, and owned queerness. Through scavenging and collecting, O’Brien assembles a reservoir of images, objects, and material from which to concoct enigmatic assemblages. In the studio, they cycle through continuous acts of deconstruction and reconstruction, and employ assemblage, ceramic handbuilding, paper making, casting, CNC routing, and woodworking, to concoct amalgamated sculptures. O’Brien exhibits these sculptures at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, Asya Geisberg Gallery, Tephra Institute for Contemporary Art, Pazo Fine Art, and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. She has been awarded residencies with PLOP, The Wassaic Project, Proyecto Ace, Art Farm, Baltimore Clayworks, Red Lodge Clay Center, Azule, and the Maple Terrace. They are the recipient of a 2022 Individual Artist Grant from the Belle Foundation for Cultural Development. In spring 2023 O’Brien had an artist residency at Stove Works. In summer 2023 she’s an Elizabeth Murray Artist Resident in Granville, New York, and a resident at Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock, New York.

Artist StatEment

I transform the cast-offs of our consumerist landscape into sculptural works that are playful, absurd, and fantastical. Queer in their irreverence, compilation of connoted material, and otherworldly affect, my work grapples with dystopian survival, queer identity, and conspicuous consumption. I scavenge found, discarded objects and allow their raw forms to direct my practice, considering a future where these are my only accessible materials. Through tinkering, playing, and mending, I deconstruct the skeletons of scavenged domestic memorabilia and graft them into off-kilter sculptures with paper pulp membranes and ceramic appendages. Their innate precarity is amusing and unnerving, with hand-wrought visible mending to provide a framework to frugally navigate our capitalistic context. The resulting works call to mind plant forms, bodies, mechanical apparatuses, and everything in between.