| MIRA O'BRIEN |
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Shattered Opticality An empathy with places that have fallen into disuse motivates the exploration and engagement with site that is the core of my practice. Vacant or overlooked places are exempted from routine experience, providing an opening for the possibility of transformation and wonder to become vivid. I find the materials of my work while wandering through the former Remmington factories in Bridgeport, or the vacant lots and forgotten piers in New Haven - places that failed to be incorporated in the constant upheaval of Urban Renewal. Abandonment and decay have transformed these materials so that they can be interpreted anew; these are the moments of wonder that I am seeking to suspend or re-stage. The crunch of broken glass underfoot or the jewel-like glimmer that twinkles across the floor of a wrecked building are the kinds of visceral experiences that led me to shards and fragments as a medium. These blasted-out architectural remnants retain the history of their past, and reflect instantaneously any new encounter. In works like "Glass Tree" and "Glass Willow" where I have painted on the glass and then assembled it on site, the painted imagery inserts the fictional between the past and present. "Glass Floor" is viewed under-foot; the floor is intended to be walked upon. As the floor becomes more trodden, the glass becomes more opaque through its increasingly complex network of fractures. The process of viewing threatens obscured the image, proposing a bodily vision over the opticality that glass, in its transparent state, traditionally allows. In a lighter, but at the same time more sinister gesture, "Headlights" serves as a booby-trap reminder of a shattered opticality. The darkly tinted reflective glass, used in "Glass Tree" and "Fallout," recalls the Claude Glass, a Victorian optical device. This convex tinted mirror was taken on walks and used as a kind of picturesque viewfinder. The idealization of the landscape as viewed through its reflection in the Claude Glass was a respite from the Industrialization that was rapidly taking place. In today’s post-industrial landscapes, entropy has taken its course through the very structures that once symbolized a certain mastery over natural forces. The unified and harmonious vision of mastery presented by the Claude Glass has been fractured, just as the spaces of industry and institution have been transformed into spaces of exemption. It is within these spaces of liminality that I want my work to hover in, to reengage with the bodily, the fictive, the fleeting and ultimately wonderment.
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