Jack O’Brien is a master of the tease. Though culturally laden with sexual connotations, its potency is driven less by the carnal than the suspense of desire at once roused and withheld. Dissonance is heightened by promise shrouded in the false illusion of realization. Tension is fundamental to the tease — yearning is nothing if not titillated by anticipation — and like the siren’s song, we remain susceptible to the innate clash in the veneer of attainability despite knowing it is not as it seems. It is a state steeped in contradiction, yet to covet what appears to be just within reach is a paradoxical phenomenon embedded in human experience. O’Brien’s practice, which encompasses installation, sculpture, painting, and drawing, explores the conflict between desire and consumption and chaos and discipline alongside concurrent tenets that dominate life under structures of late capitalism. As such, he considers desire and longing in relation to other contemporary concerns, including industrialization, the commercialization of contemporary art, the construct of the city (London, in particular), austerity, and eroticism.
Together, these topics create a framework for O’Brien to explore how these seemingly disparate areas are interconnected; as a result, he argues they form an overarching network of realms that all operate according to the same basic code. At its core, O’Brien is interested in the innate discrepancies in the idea of streamlined systems — which he often refers to as “closed-loop systems” — and the inevitable disruption of such sleek, modernized processes by the messiness of the human hand. For O’Brien, a code — a term he uses near-interchangeably with language — is used to address tensions that sit at the center of human life. The disparities he depicts, including the tug-of-war in desire, inherently render the work all the more compelling.