Pierogi is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by John O’Connor. O’Connor’s modest media—graphite, colored pencil, and paper—belie the scope and effect of his large-scale works on paper. The final drawings tend to resemble paintings more than drawings. Through idiosyncratic and entirely invented systems, he converts what is ordinarily invisible—spoken and written language, chance events, chaos theory—into visual representations that reveal patterns of speech and events. He begins each drawing with a subject of interest and through haphazard research collects data and begins to experiment with it. He completes one part of the drawing, responds to what he’s put down in a Rube Goldbergian way, and continues in this way until the drawing is complete.

“I don’t plan much ahead of time. I usually start out with one element, a shape maybe. Sometimes I have an idea of where the work will go, but it almost never goes there. I don’t know how long it will take, when it will be finished or what it will end up looking like…I like to let things happen. The final work is an accumulation of small events, missteps, or changes of direction, recorded over time. ...For me to consider a drawing successful it has to end up looking like something I couldn’t predict and…take on a life of its own. In the process I need to get lost in the information.” (Brooklyn Rail interview with Eve Aschheim, 2008)

The constantly evolving systems that O’Connor devises to construct the works exist alongside the final image so that his process becomes a visual element of the work; the concept of the drawing and its formal elements are represented simultaneously.

The works in this exhibition deal with language and chance and, through O’Connor’s processing of information, become visual representations of language, chance, and experimentation. O’Connor notes that the title of this exhibition, Flannel Tongue, “is a phrase my grandfather would use to describe someone who is a smooth talker, but it really means someone who has trouble speaking… I like that mix-up. …[I]t’s the idea of how we use language to persuade, motivate, mask or conceal….” (O’Connor, 2008)

In his most recent work, The Middle, O’Connor transcribes the beginnings and endings of stories: from personal e-mail messages and letters, to texts such as Dante’s Inferno, among others. First lines appear at the top of the drawing and endings at the bottom. The result is an abstract, grid-like quilt of text that can potentially be read horizontally or vertically. The center of another recent work, A Good Idea, details past disasters, the last word of one fragment connecting to the next. References to current events extend out from that section in scallop-shaped patterns, with influential historical texts, such as Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, The 911 Commission Report and others, forming the outer points. The outermost section, mostly gray in tone, consists of predictions for the future. Each element is like a puzzle piece that connects one event to the next. It is an illogical but entirely valid way to link the past, present, and future.

Two other works, Pay to Play and You Can’t Win, are efforts to decode phenomena surrounding the lottery. Pay to Play is O’Connor’s attempt to “visualize what winning the lottery would feel like.” To make the drawing he compiled winning lottery numbers from different states across the country. The last set of five numbers in each group were used as a zip code to lead him to the next state. In You Can’t Win he translates a wide range of information about the lottery—social commentary, winning numbers, losing predictions, odds of winning—into forms, shapes, and patterns. This will be O’Connor’s third one-person exhibition at Pierogi.