July 2024 AIR: Kean O’Brien
Kean talks about the intersectionality of body and environment
Hi Kean! We are stoked to have you in the lab for our July Residency! I am so curious and excited about your work. How does vulnerability and visibility play a role in your work?
Vulnerability is not so much a role but the axis of my work and place I strive to live within. The work I am making feels like an invitation for empathy which I think takes vulnerability to feel. And not just for me but for all bodies. I am wanting to lay a foundation for our communal disabling that is and will continue to occur. Visibility is not something I directly try to name but is inherent in the representation of self and my perspective within these images. It does matter that my/this body is trans and sick and disabled and that is a read of the work I want; however I am wanting to move away from the need to create hope or futures for the trans crip body. Why can’t death be a place of abundance and not the worst thing to happen to this body.
I am working on a PhD right now and my dissertation is me creating trans crip nihilism theory. Asking the question of what use is it for us to fight for the future for trans crip bodies when the whole structure we are fighting within is built and thrives on the disposability of bodies that cannot produce within capitalism. I am proposing that nihilism is not a bad thing or negative but rather positive and generative. In this writing I’m also exploring the idea that we are not in late stage capitalism but rather in death stage capitalism. And in that there is acceptance of death as the future and is where true freedom and liberation will exist.
Can you talk more about your ability to morph craft with the paint by number, photo transformations that you are making and trauma induced content?
I have not really thought about this transformation you’re naming. Im glad to start thinking about this. I do see craft being a part of the work and an attempt to make accessible work…what I think I mean by that is: work that is make (able) and not out of reach technically. This medium was something I had access to in early Covid l, where I was, and often still am deeply isolated.
The repetitiveness of the work (hours and hours of painting) creates a rhythm and makes me appreciate craft work more. I am definetly pretentiously trained as an artist and work to undo that learning all the time. There was time in my life where what I’m doing now would have seemed so cliche and ungrounded in “real art practice” and I would not have allowed room for it to be work. The writing/painting/creating of these images into paintings is like bringing the past, that I don’t remember back to me. The trauma lies in the photos I took and the lack of memory and then again in the recreation.
In this new body of work you are starting, how does texture and layers play a part in reflecting the content of the work?
That’s a great question. There is something to this work about digital photographs being taken and not printed as photographs but rendered onto a canvas by a machine that reads the color tones in 36 colors and then matches pigment/paint to corresponding created color tones, then painted in acrylic paint and now will be printed digitally or transferred onto different materials… that’s a lot of layers and transforming. I have transformed so much since those photographs were taken. I have a different view on my life, my body, the meaning of my life, etc. I need to see the work created in this way to fully answer this question, I think. I am excited to find that answer!
There is a strong sense of environment and how that environment relates to the body and physicality of self. Can you tell us a little more about how you are combining these elements into a motif that reflects such depth and intricate meaning?
These environments are constructed spaces that so many bodies see, feel and often die within. These spaces are sturdy and grounded. I feel deeply safe in hospitals; I am weirdly comforted by them. Even the sort uncomfortable gender dynamics I experience from being misgendered to having nurses be afraid to ask me what my genitalia is when giving my something to give a urine sample in. It is familar in a way most things are not. I know what to expect, I know what the feelings will be around it. Also my life has been saved numerous times within those walls. The environments are a subject within this work. They are homes I have lived in; some times for 45 days at a time.
When I paint them the detail reveals itself slowly and I am taken back to those spaces and how familar I felt within them. I am writing a new image. This is part of why I see these as photographs, as images. They are not meant to be read as paintings. In fact, the reason I wasn’t find news ways to show them is because I think the deep traditions of painting and the desperate need for painting to be revered in its formal qualities limits how many view this work. I have gotten feedback that they “aren’t good paintings” in which I reply, “great- they are not paintings!”
So this next phase of the work will be bringing it all back to the content and hopefully separate the work from directly being read as paintings- but still hold qualities and layers of that being a piece of it all.
How does your long standing relationship with radical pedagogy, community building and grassroots organizing influence your work?
Those held identities within myself make up who I am. My fight for my own liberation is wrapped up in my fight for everybody’s liberation. I don’t just fight for my own. I hope my work cannot be separated from all the work I am constantly striving to do. In fact I think a lot of my projects are about this very thing and hold a lot of room for care and community. Making art is care work…the vulnerability and hold we all have when we create goes beyond ourselves, right? Creating in all its beautiful forms will surpass the ending of all of this existence.
Also, I must say this, cause making art during a genocide is surreal. Free Palestine. What will you (the reader of this) say in 20 years when somebody asks you what you did when we watched the Palestinian genocide happen in real time?
Kean O’Brien
Kean O’Brien (he/they) (b. 1984, Lima, Ohio) is a white trans, chronically ill, disabled, artist, educator, and academic living between Chicago and Madison. As a multimedia artist working interdisciplinarily between photography, painting, found images, installation, and writing, he focuses on the nuance of gendered construction, whiteness, and the body as a landscape for survival, death, grief, and trauma. His academic writing explores the current landscape of higher education from an abolitionist, decolonial lens. He has a longstanding commitment to radical pedagogy, community building, and grassroots organizing. He is called upon to approach his work from a place of solidarity with the communities and environments that hold him, to create a sustainable collective for art and writing to thrive in and to aid in the breaking down of the toxic systems leading marginalized bodies, earth and society to global collapse.
Kean O’Brien received an MA in Education and Leadership in 2022, an MFA from CalArts in 2011, and graduated with a BFA from SAIC in 2008, and is currently a Ph.D. student at University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Recent and upcoming writing publications include The Desire for Ugliness: Queers, Rebels, and Freaks, (part of Vol. 5 Playing Shakespeare's Characters, published by Peter Lang Press). Home: The Trans Body (FWD: Museum, published by UIC Museum Studies Department and Sister Spit, 2020), Boyle Heights and The Fight Against Gentrification As State Violence (The American Quarterly Journal, published by John Hopkins Press, 2019), The American Culture of Guns and Prisons (FAYN Magazine, 2017), and others.
O’Brien has exhibited, screened, and curated work at Mana Contemporary in Chicago, Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Emory College, Fotografiska Museum, The Gay and Lesbian Canadian Archive, and Czong Institute of Contemporary Art in South Korea, among others. They have also shared their experience as creative educator with various institutions, speaking at University of Illinois, the University of New Mexico, University of Lebanon, Beirut, University of Arizona in Tucson, University of California, Santa Cruz, National Women’s Studies Association Conference in San Francisco, American Studies Conference in Honolulu, and San Francisco Art Institute.