Hillel O'Leary

Lives and works in Providence, RI, USA

Artist statement

My sculpture, installation, and site-specific works are snapshot accretions capturing brief moments of clarity in a continuing process of navigating an increasingly turbulent world. They are an attempt to make meaning between the familiar and otherworldly, while provoking gut-feelings of tension, connection, loss, and wonder, through obfuscation, abstraction and interpretation of material history and culture. This work draws from my life experience as a Queer Jewish person who has always had to camouflage themself in order to feel safe. This work centers precarity as the coming state of everything, and with it, I hope to bring a level of urgency to a sense of self-reflection that is needed if we are to reckon with the machinations of capitalism in order to make the unconscious identity and social norm conscious. To look beyond the way things have always been.

Artwork