John J. O'Connor (artist)

His works draw on relationships between spoken and written language, psychological fallacies, self-experimentation, mathematics, emergence in science and anthropology, and climate prediction and error.

O'Connor's work maps transformations from one known state to another—whether sudden and dramatic, like a political revolution that upends an entire belief structure instantaneously, or an earthquake that opens the ground in seconds.

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 unique conceptual framework, which he expanded at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2000.

With their integration of information and language with shapes, forms, logos, pop imagery, and patterns, O'Connor's works link the process of looking with that of reading, decoding, and interpreting.

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.