MICHAEL PATRICK O’BRIEN: Familiar Address - Opening
Sat, Dec 08
|U.N.O. Arts Center
The UNO St. Claude Gallery is excited to announce “Familiar Address,” a collection of photographs by Michael Patrick O’Brien, running from December 8th, 2018 through January 6th, 2019. Join us for an opening reception at the gallery on December 8th from 6-9 p.m.
ON VIEW
Dec 08, 2018, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM
U.N.O. Arts Center, 2429 St Claude Ave, New Orleans, LA 70117, USA
ABOUT THE ARTIST
A photographer of things, people, and spaces who owes as much to the practitioners of large-format photography, such as Joel Sternfeld (b. 1944) and Walker Evans (1903–1975), as to representational painters, such as Catherine Murphy (b. 1946), Fairfield Porter (1907–1975), and John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Michael Patrick O’Brien images people and places known to him, primarily family, in an ongoing and open-ended body of color photographs. This image-by-image engagement with familiar people and places forms a consistent practice within his broader work as an artist.
In his photographs, O’Brien translates his family’s lineage and their spaces into sites of both repetition and evolution. Genetics are inherited, body postures are echoed, the formality of interiors is mimicked, values are passed down, death is present, children appear, religious customs are passed down, and family traditions persist and transform. With a photographer’s formal rigor, O’Brien’s starting point is an attention to color and…