John Jerome O’Connor is an American artist primarily known for his large-scale, labor-intensive, abstract works on paper. In his work, O'Connor transforms information through idiosyncratic processes, creating equally idiosyncratic abstract shapes, forms, and patterns.
Early work
Influenced by the art and music of John Cage while studying at Pratt Institute, O'Connor created abstractions based on chance operations. In 1998 he made a series of small drawings by dipping jazz brushes in ink before playing them directly on paper. Each drawing represented a specific beat per minute played for a specific duration. In the late 1990s, O'Connor begin to explore systematic approaches to art making through drawing. These works were diagrammatic and process based. Though the compositions were simpler in these and other experimental works made in this period, O'Connor was laying the basic groundwork for his future methods and defining his uniqueconceptual framework, which he expanded at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2000.
Recent work
O'Connor's central works are large-scale drawings on paper made with colored pencil, and graphite. He also makes sculpture, photography, collage, and installation. O'Connor is also a member of the artist collective NonCoreProjector. Their project "Verbolect" is a multi-media work that explores the relationship between AI and human language, emotion, endurance, and computer-based introspection. O'Connor's large-scale drawings often contain abstract forms made from multi-colored fields of text and patterns which are partly derived from combining simple logical processes and partly from intuitive reactions, described as his "trademark hallucinatory style". These processes often force unlikely connections between seemingly disparate data often with humorous results. Information used in his work include conversations the artist has had with Cleverbot, charts on male pattern baldness, chess game patterns, sunspot fluctuations, temperature prediction and error, the prophesies of Nostradomus, census reports, etc. Patterns that emerge from linking these disparate data are often a structural conduit for his unique logic and subsequent aesthetic. O'Connor's most recent series of 26 interconnected drawings are large, pictogram-like works that depict, through text and graphic images, the lifespan of a working class male as he encountered myriad obstacles, both real and imagined. These works reference Hollywood filmmaking, consumer drug effects, video game spaces, social class, popular music, dream imagery, theories of time perception, literary fiction, advertisement logos, etc. In a recent series of photographic collages, O'Connor fused close up NASA images of sunspots onto the surface of his face, creating, disturbing composite portraits that investigated the relationship between celestial patterns and those of the human being on Earth. Overall, many of O'Connor's recent works explore the moment when an individual's internal intentions and desires are affected, opposed, or concretely influenced by a more powerful external force.
