Laurie O’Brien’s show in the Llewelyn Gallery shows how you can blend two completely different forms of art to create a more complex and interesting unified piece. The combination of physical fabrication to make the smaller forms of architecture make up the background. The other piece of the project, the animations, make up the foreground. While both of these styles of art exist within their own respective sections of art, Laurie O’Brien managed to discover the full potential of both art forms as one single project.
When you first walk into the gallery there is a lot of movement going on. The projections dance across the buildings, each an individual character responding to the environment around them. The whole room felt like multiple tiny movie theaters, playing at the same time to tell many stories. The composition of the piece had an underlying contrast. The difference between the rigid unmoving geometry and the flowing organic motion of the human figures provided abstract imagery.
The use of the stagnant background and the kinetic foreground show how the manipulation of dimensions can make a piece seem more life-like. It felt like being in one of the animations that we worked on during our first semester. It created a surreal atmosphere within the gallery to see multiple planes of existence, that never truly touched, working together to create a new world. The figures interacted with the world but they could never truly live in it. When the lights came on the figures disappeared, and only the rigid geometry of the small buildings remained, waiting for the darkness to come and for the figures to return.
The whole concept of this idea can relate very strongly back to our growth in the DMA program. Instead of focusing on one medium like sculpture or maybe just animation. We could start looking to blend ideas and materials in order to create something that both defines us as artist and showcases our creativity. Perhaps later in our years of study we can implement the ideas that Laurie O’Brien brought to the Llewelyn Gallery and create our own multi-dimensional world.
Niklas James Scheuerman 