“The Reward“ is the primary main institutional UK present by London-based artist Jack O’Brien (b. 1993). O’Brien, recipient of the 2023 Camden Artwork Centre Rising Artist Prize at Frieze, will current an formidable new set up aware of the structure and construction of Gallery Three.

Central to the exhibition is a newly commissioned work: a serious spatial intervention, comprised of two suspended, metal exterior staircases, paying homage to these as soon as seen in areas of South London—the place the artist resides—previous to city redevelopment schemes. The staircases characteristic chrome ball punctuations and are wrapped in a skin-like cloth paying homage to constructing hoardings. Utilizing the construction of the prevailing window design, a big scale, system of holes and vents will create an adjoining mild set up. The Victorian-style ornamental panes and arches of the gallery area—now abstracted and obscured—additional complicating how pure mild strikes in and in regards to the gallery.

The intervention introduces a rippling that cuts by way of order and the presupposed situations of how materials, weight, and form current inside the spatial dynamics of the gallery. On this rippling, the viewer is directed to think about the work far past its materials or architectural constraints. Objects present glimpses of earlier lives. Acquainted gestures are rooted in on a regular basis experiences however altered with the slightest of motions—a staircase is turned onto its facet and sheathed in a “airtight sealing” of business stockinette.

O’Brien’s objects carry a pointy cost of stress and imbrication that the viewers is invited to situate themselves within the midst of. Crowbars, aluminium pipes, balls, and holes all exist as websites the place data and gestures are consolidated. Paired along with his long-standing funding in ‘linguistic constructions,’ his figurations obtain a poetic register that performs on motifs of music and language to an unsettling but heady impact. Throughout his follow, works are imbued with a rhythmic presence. Sculptures swell with quantity and function repositories for overlapping and repeating aural gestures. Repetitions, pauses, intonations and elongations—all of that are aspects that play into the creation of those tonal constructions—discover their manifestation within the inanimate system.

The works invoke a direct and potent relationship to the physique. Articulations of need, restraint, and the linkages between them are forged in a brand new mild by way of O’Brien’s thought-about utilization of materiality and kind. His objects, sheathed and wrapped in flesh-like membranes, embody a physicality that each inhabits and disrupts the architectural areas they exist in. Amid their presence, a “corporeal identification” takes place that extends into and expands past the encompassing atmosphere.

A brand new essay by Dominic Johnson is printed within the newest version of Camden Artwork Centre’s long-running File Be aware collection, produced for each exhibition, it represents an essential strand of the organisation’s programme, enabling the fee of a brand new piece of long-form writing accompanied by a studying/listening/watching checklist compiled by the artist. They’re an accessible useful resource, obtainable within the galleries for a small cost and on-line free of charge.

at Camden Arts Center, London
till December 29, 2024