Michael O’Brien: Becoming No One | Perla Solo Show of Irish master

‘Becoming No One’ is a solo show of new work by Irish artist Michael O’Brien. The work is multidisciplinary and has been entirely made since his arrival in Perla. This new body of work will culminate as a unified installation of drawing, photography and sound art. The artist has travelled to live within the gallery for one month, deliberately engaging with the space in a non-preempted way.

The content of this new body of work is self-reflective and speaks of the shifts in self-perception one can go through in everyday life, from the base and primitive to the enlightened and ego dissolving. The work articulates an intuitive expression of how personal identity and habitual tendencies or desires are manifested from a domestic situation, to a creative environment, social or communal environment and also in this particular context in preparing a public display.

O’Brien acknowledges Perla as a former factory space and post-industrial environment, as a creative space that could not possibly have been planned. Evolving from its original use as a purely functional environment for the production of paper, in a newly creative context the space itself is now presented as a kind of raw, spontaneous and open-ended infrastructural canvas.

According to O’Brien this unique spontaneity of Perla creates the perfect opening for the artist to experience and express something truly immersive that his ego could not have prefabricated. Removed from his usual reference points of identity and day-to-day life, it is embraced as a space to ‘become no one’, to drop all expectation and simply allow the creative impulse to unfold as it will.

Trusting in his track record of playful and often crudely churned out content creation, familiar recurring motifs are prone to populate the space, recreating old vantage points of the artist’s life that were no doubt catalysts of old patterns of identity onto the galleries present altar of awareness, from single sex school environments to his domestic upbringing as the youngest person in a family of twelve.

Michael in Umelec Magazine 2016/1

Michael in Divus London