MORE IMAGES FROM THE SHOW

PRESS RELEASE for upcoming Solo Show

Richard Heller Gallery Presents: 

David O'Brien:  My Pet Doppelgänger

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 12^th,  5-7 pm

Exhibition:  May 12 - June 16, 2012

David O'Brien,  Friendship Drawing #wtfWTFwtf,  2012, C-Print, 40" x 48", Edition of 2

Richard Heller Gallery is excited to present My Pet Doppelgänger, David O’Brien’s first exhibition with the gallery and the first solo show of his new body of photographic work.   

Over two years and tens of thousands of photographs in the making, David O’Brien’s debut in photography is a massive undertaking in real-world social networking.  The result is a collection of images of almost shocking energy and complexity.

Armed with a keen interest in group dynamics, swarm theory and emergence, O’Brien initially set out to re-interpret a series of his large-scale crayon drawings as photo collages.  The drawings were swarms of thousands of tiny multi-colored figures, nicknamed “potato people drawings” for their dime-sized circular bodies.  A central motivation was simply to find a way to break the cloistered pattern of the artist alone in the studio, laboring over drawings night after night.  This simple impulse snowballed into an unexpectedly ambitious and all-consuming enterprise.

In his usual persistent and somewhat obsessive manner, O’Brien began photographing everyone he knew.  Months were spent understanding and perfecting technique and methodically planning photo sessions with friends one at a time.  In this way the art making process was completely transformed from something solitary and monastic to something social and endlessly collaborative.   It's a study in identity, body language and human diversity.  Each individual photo session is a unique performance, documented and aggregated into an immense diagram of shared experience.

O’Brien rejects any sort of generative, algorithmic approach to collage, preferring instead to place each image one at a time, finding joy in seeing inter-personal relationships emerge from placing one friend next to another.  As compositions grew larger and more intense, a custom computer was even built by the artist powerful enough to handle the titanic file sizes.  And when friends couldn't make it to Los Angeles, the entire photo setup (which itself is a continually evolving project) got packed up and transported to a different city.  The project, initially nicknamed The Human Entropy Project, is still ongoing and has become something of a phenomenon.  Look closely and you may find someone you recognize.  O’Brien stresses that it's not about how many people are there but who is there, what binds and separates them, and how they interact in this entirely synthetic space.

My Pet Doppelgänger is a reminder of the profound degree of identity duplication exploding every day all over the web.  Each one of us now lives with multiple doppelgängers; shadows of ourselves in the form of accounts, profiles, preferences, feeds, posts and photo streams.  Who are all of these creatures?  Are they friends, pets, monsters?  To what degree can we even control them?  What sort of life do they lead when we're not looking?  Might they replicate themselves like RNA, or some other chemical precursor to biological life billions of years ago?  These are the questions O’Brien’s images begin to raise.  At the same time the work paints a chaotic and profoundly positive image of humanity as we know it today, each one of us competing for attention, connecting, searching for individuality and flying through space.  

David O’Brien was born in Washington D.C. and raised in rural southern Maryland.  He received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Virginia Tech, most notably working for Frank Gehry in Los Angeles before quitting architecture to pursue art.  His work has been exhibited in solo shows in Berlin and Los Angeles and in group shows in Los Angeles, New York and throughout the U.S.  He's been published in numerous magazines including Wired and +81 Magazine in Japan.  David’s work was recently featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles MOCA FRESH Exhibition in March of 2012.  He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Richard Heller Gallery

2525 Michigan Avenue, #B-5A, Santa Monica, CA 90404, 310.453.9191

http://www.richardhellergallery.com/

SOLO SHOW May 12th - Richard Heller Gallery

Upcoming Solo Show @ Richard Heller Gallery - opening reception May 12, 5-7pm
(May 12 - June 16th)
Link to show info here
Download the press release here

Friendship Drawings - V and V2

MOCA FRESH!

UPCOMING:  MOCA FRESH - I'll have a piece on view in March at MOCA!!!
Downtown Los Angeles at the Grand Avenue location - more details +++ HERE +++

An IMagE of yOu caN be FrienDs wIth an iMage of Me

Naomi, (half scale) 40" x 60"

Friendship Drawing #19, 48" x 72"

Friendship Drawing #ZZZZ, 36" x 50"

VIDEO - Studies for Disengagement from Earth's Gravity

note: if you're having trouble try turning HD off, although I recommend leaving it on if you can and allow the video to pre-load by pressing play then pause and waiting a minute or so.

A Study for the Disengagement from Earth's Gravity #120, OR "A video to be watched continuously as an aid for contemplating leaving Earth's surface forever" from David O'Brien on Vimeo.

A Study for the Disengagement from Earth's Gravity #122, OR "A video to be watched continuously as an aid for contemplating leaving Earth's surface forever" from David O'Brien on Vimeo.

Study for Disengagement from Earth's Gravity #051 from David O'Brien on Vimeo.
"Study for Disengagement from Earth's Gravity #051" or "A video to be watched continuously as an aid for contemplating leaving earth's surface forever"

updates, reworkings, new things

Untitled, 52" x 72"

Untitled, 52" x 72"

Untitled, 58" x 75"

some background about this project - It is ongoing for 2 years now. The project is about the politics of friendship, social structure, and the threshold between the everyday and the sublime. Everyone here is someone that is a friend or that I have a social connection with. In this sense it is a sort of vast social diagram. It is also a form of critique of synthetic friendship and mediated interaction via technology. That's the short explanation anyway. It is an aggregation and distillation of tens of thousands of photos taken of many people who all have this shared experience (of being photographed one-by-one) that connects and also separates them.

Leaning Tower of Patricia

Prismatic Patricia, 96" x 72", 2011 

Leaning Tower of Patricia, 72"" x 50", 2011 

Prismatic Patrick, 96" x 72", 2011 

nother new sketch

1:14am sketch

48"x60"

Portraits

Portrait of the Artist Taro Hattori

Portrait of the Artist Yang Woo Kim

Portrait of the Builder and Art Benefactor Kenny Furr

Portrait of the Poet Amie Whittemore

Portrait of the Writer Sharyl Green

New Piece - 60"x90"

New Piece - 60"x90" - Detail Images

New Work

Untitled - 2011 - 48"x72" Archival Inkjet

Detail

Detail

Detail

Willie E. and Me

(all above 38" x 50")

I wanna take a minute to say that my time at Vermont Studio Center was amazing, more than I could have ever hoped for.  Thanks to all the visiting artists (Steve Locke, Nayland Blake, Alison Saar and Suzanne McClelland) who did studio visits with me. Thanks to the incredible staff there and I ESPECIALLY wanna say thanks to all the artists and writers who were there for the month and became great friends.  Several of their links are in my sidebar. I hope we can all keep in touch.

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