John O'Connor

Lives and works in Peekskill, NY, USA

Artist statement

My work hybridizes science, politics, mathematics, autobiography, and fiction through processes of transmogrification and superimposition. By overlaying and combining seemingly unrelated fragments of information, I seek to reveal patterns, connections, and consequences that might otherwise remain hidden. These fragments are translated through invented methods into brightly colored patterns, abstract forms, graphic texts, and notational marks. Often, my drawings borrow from systems of image-making that mirror the same power structures shaping our choices. These structures appear in both intimate, personal contexts and in the predictable chains of thought and action that guide our public personas. The process is cumulative: I do not pre-plan a work’s progression but allow the accretion of data to determine each next step. Each addition responds to what has already emerged, producing a kind of Rube Goldberg-like chain reaction across the drawing’s surface. I am especially interested in tragic humor, moments that strike us as funny at first but that also foreshadow precarious futures. Currently, my subjects range from political and financial entanglement, weather prediction, lottery systems, Nostradamus prophecies, and Alzheimer’s progression, to crime mapping, hair-loss patterns, obesity and genetics, itch theories, perceptions of time, political cartographies, slot machine probabilities, decision-making studies, and paradoxes such as the heap. I frequently use myself as a...

Artwork