The Experimental Joseph O’Connell – by A. M. Kadinopoulou, 2024

Joseph O’Connell’s interactive installations take us on a metaphysical journey through spatial and sensory awareness. With over 30 years of experimentation and a dedication to breaking boundaries, he is a gifted artist and storyteller known for incorporating light, color and motion into his large-scale sculptures and installations.

O’Connell has crafted in a wide range of materials and meta-materials, as well as masterfully captured a cornucopia of themes and audiences. Inspired by history, science and human communications, his work provides a grounding consciousness, that we belong to something bigger than ourselves. His non-hierarchical narratives include equality, collaboration, acceptance and community through celebration and remembrance. Many of his works offer experiences that capture the collective identity of a community while others allow for unique personal engagement, in an appreciation of individual viewpoints.

Moving between the duality of figuration and abstraction, O’Connell embraces art’s purpose as the trapdoor that connects worlds we simultaneously inhabit. The coming together of our multiple worlds is visible from his first publicly installed piece ‘Desert O’, all the way to one of his latest installations ‘Multiple Selves’.The earlier work positioned in Tucson, Arizona 20 years ago, is an interactive solar-powered sculpture, an O-shaped portal constructed out of translucent white rings, precisely bolted together.

The inner structure is purposefully visible and illuminated at night by a string of LED lights that shines through the installation’s semi-opaque “skin”. The artist often incorporates a secret something into the finished work; in this case, a hidden button manually runs the hand-coded sequences of lights, changing the sculpture’s colours. Interaction offers a visceral experience of the inner and outer shell coexisting as separate identities, yet part of an all-encompassing one.

O’Connell’s more recent work titled ‘Multiple Selves’, conveys the same message in an elevated method. The inner structure is now the viewer, who must enter into the artwork. Clear glass spheres of varying sizes have been fused together in a form that resembles a diver’s helmet, suspended from the ceiling. The heavy sculpture has an ethereal weightless quality, like a pendulum made out of soap bubbles floating in space. When ‘worn’, the piece completely covers one’s head and neck, while the glass spheres reflect into each other ad infinitum, sparkling as one moves in and around the sculpture.

To enter the installation and look out through the glass, is a redefining experience of our body in space. We see a small upside-down image refracted in each of the spheres, creating a kaleidoscope out of our surroundings. The mind briefly attempts to piece the images together, before realizing they’re all the same picture. The fractal distortion allows multiple viewings of the same environment, which our perception recognizes as one, thus introducing the idea of oneness being a result of many individual facets. Meanwhile, our singular self is also ‘divided’, appearing to the outsider as an upside-down portrait on the surface of each sphere. The inspiration behind this work lies in bridging the many identities we hold dear on the inside, with the multiple roles we adopt on the outside, as members of a community.

An installation artist contends with shaping space, which O’Connell takes as a challenge and a privilege. This has established him as a force to be reckoned with in site-specific public works, that aim to interact with the social fabric of a community. Beyond the highly-controlled museum or gallery settings, his installations are framed by the larger forces we encounter in the natural world, such as light, sound and motion. His unique approach to customizing collective experiences into monuments sets him apart; from the subatomic, cell-dividing perspective to the celestial realm of pure knowledge, the insights we derive from O’Connells works are an aesthetic anthropology of what unites us.

The concepts of counting time and memory are intricately woven into the realization of his outdoor monuments. Whether in his accurate solar and stellar Observatory, his seasonal sun-dial Chromanova or his commemoration of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, a collaboration with Anneliese Bruner. When a community adopts one of his installations as their own, its influence reverberates further than the artist’s reach, transforming the air around it and the outdoors into an infinite museum. This immersion creates dialogue and shared experiences, which changes the interaction with the work over time and embellishes it with a rich, evolving collective identity.

The sheer scale of some of his outdoor installations acts to incorporate the viewer into the artwork. To approach and engage with the sculpture is always a new experience, since they are designed to react to natural forces, giving us the impression of life. Reminiscent of Alexander Calder’s elegant yet bold mobiles, O’Connell created ‘Broomcorn’, a kinetic sculpture powered by wind currents. Twelve delicate stalks of stainless steel set with multi-colored glass spheres, hypnotically balance in an ascending arc inside Brookfield’s community center in Colorado. The light bouncing off the work influences a bigger area, creating dynamic color landscapes on the adjacent walls. It is a show of lasting and immersive environmental imagery without projection mapping, just material science.

A public space is generally ungoverned by the intention of visiting a work of art. We commonly stumble upon public installations and reinvent our notion of a space with new discoveries each time we visit. Some of O’Connell’s projects, like the award-winning 2021 ‘Chasing the Stars’, need pulling, pushing or some other physical interaction, which creates a more memorable experience since it is registered both by the mind and the body. At Google’s campus in Boston, we can encounter the installation, ‘Find Joy’, in which disjointed sets of pipes seem to randomly climb and snake over the site. The title invites us on a quest to find the right angle and secret vantage point from where one can read the message hidden in plain sight. The scattered pipes spell out the word ‘Joy’, accompanied by two concentric hearts.

In addition to tools such as motion sensors, programmed algorithms and light manipulation, O’Connell goes beyond sight by combining sound with art. Without computational or electronic means, he designs work that emits subsonic vibrations, binaural frequencies and healing tones. Central to his focus is the effect on the area around the installations, including the viewer and their interaction as part of the sculpture, sharing the same space for a moment. In this way he is dedicated to creating work that enhances positive experiences for young adults and children.

Endlessly experimental in new techniques, like monumental 3d printing, O’Connell contends that we don’t take play seriously enough, stating that: “Play is when we open ourselves up and meaning can come in.” Steel, bronze, glass, dichroic acrylic, light, sound, air and space are part of a long list of materials that make up his practice. He uses diffused light patterns and color mixing to move us away from a high-tech feeling and reconnect the viewer to the natural world.

Experiencing O’Connell’s work is a reminder to be inquisitive, to appreciate each moment and celebrate the expanding cosmos with child-like awe and wonder. He brings to light the threads that join us, as individuals who are also part of a central core and a timeless universal identity. A creative explorer, who opens trapdoors in the wilderness and connects our inner to our outer worlds.