{"id":437,"date":"2014-06-26T20:13:54","date_gmt":"2014-06-26T20:13:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trishandjill.com\/?page_id=437"},"modified":"2015-07-21T13:26:22","modified_gmt":"2015-07-21T18:26:22","slug":"artist-statements","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jillcobrien.com\/?page_id=437","title":{"rendered":"Artist Statements"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Creature Comfort<\/a><\/h2>\n

Creature Comfort<\/em>\u00a0(2010-present) is an ongoing, collaborative body of work by Trish Igo and Jill O’Brien, featuring ceramics, taxidermy, preserved specimens, installation art, soft sculpture, mixed media, and found objects.<\/p>\n

\"Trish<\/a><\/p>\n

All animals (fur, bone, specimens, etc.) were acquired post-mortem.\u00a0\u00a0The artists were not directly or indirectly involved in any of the animals\u2019 deaths.\u00a0\u00a0All taxidermy was performed solely by the artists unless otherwise indicated.\u00a0<\/strong> \u00a0<\/strong> \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Objects have long served as a profound emotional comfort to us, often creating a range of surrogate relationships.\u00a0\u00a0We continually acquire nostalgic items, compensating for what we have lost or never had.\u00a0\u00a0By surrounding ourselves with these objects in our homes and daily lives,\u00a0we are developing an intimacy and a level of comfort that borders a fantasy life.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0These possessions represent past memories, our personal histories, and reflect the events in life that shaped our aesthetic.<\/p>\n

Domestic objects also indicate an idealism; the things we want and want to be.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In our private environments, seemingly mundane trinkets and miscellany become trophies and talismans, validating our self image by reflecting our ideal pasts and futures. \u00a0 In similar fashion, we have nurtured a \u2018collection\u2019 of pets as they have wandered into our lives, needing care and comfort.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As we became more invested in these animals, every stray began to simulate the same potential emotional burden.\u00a0\u00a0An overwhelming anxiety pervaded each incident of finding an abandoned animal.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0This ever-present responsibility created a compulsion to care for the remains of the dead animals we came across as well.\u00a0\u00a0Making art allows us to keep an animal preserved, conjointly caring for a neglected animal, elevating a moment, and adding to our domestic imaginarium.<\/p>\n

Animal philosophies are rife with contradictions brought about by our childhood idolatry of animals and our societal use and slaughter of them.\u00a0\u00a0Commixing these extremes, we create a dreamlike expos\u00e9 of our haunted relationships to animals. We compose vignettes using objects we covet in order to construct situations that provoke reflection on the subjective and selective ways that people view these creatures.\u00a0\u00a0By intertwining our escalating domestic fetishes and increasing beastly burdens, we collect nests for them to dwell, treasuring these animals in a way that assuages us and inspires empathy from the viewer. — Trish Igo and Jill O\u2019Brien<\/p>\n

Creature Comfort Images<\/a> ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Crowd of Drifters<\/a><\/h2>\n

Crowd of Drifters: Photographs and Collections<\/em>\u00a0(2004-2011) is a collaborative body of work by Trish Igo and Jill O’Brien, featuring large and small scale chromogenic prints (from large format film), preserved specimens, and installation and process art.<\/p>\n

\"Trish<\/a><\/p>\n

“An animal cannot, so far as we know, transcend its suffering.\u00a0 A helpless elephant hunted by sharpshooters waiting by the water hole, a deer fleeing the hunter or dying on a highway, a pig or lamb or calf trapped amid the bedlam\u2014they cannot draw meaning from their hardship, or find refuge in God, or pray for deliverance.\u00a0 That still leaves the enduring<\/em> of it, the deprivation and fear and panic and loneliness.\u00a0 We know those feelings too.” [1]<\/p>\n

Animals are ideal victims of human violence.\u00a0 In all interactions between animals and our society they are victimized, sometimes intentionally and more often, indiscriminately.\u00a0 Their complete helplessness and inability to ask, complain, or beg for consideration underscores their need for our mercy.\u00a0 Our superiority in reason and industry charges us with moral compassion and responsibility for their quality of life. We believe it may be our awareness of this burden that has instilled our drive to produce art.\u00a0 Because pets were present throughout our childhoods, we have experienced the cycle of love, attachment, and loss and have come to design our lives around this painful knowledge.\u00a0 Animals are the most common experience of death in our lives and therefore become a powerful symbol for our futility in protecting those we love from harm, as well as dealing with our own mortality.\u00a0 These animals\u2014pets, strays, orphans, injured or dying wildlife, and wildings killed by man\u2019s invasion all serve as horrid reminders of the complete loss every living thing will eventually suffer. Despite the inevitable outcome, we continue to adopt and care for animals.\u00a0 With every animal we bring into our homes, we multiply our responsibilities and anxieties about them, and subconsciously about death.\u00a0 The subjugation of animals by mankind is therefore the most threatening emotional burden in our lives.<\/p>\n

Just as we adopt animals we consider abused and unwanted, we adopt the dead animals that mankind has struck down and forgotten.\u00a0 It is the emotional distance between ourselves and these animals we never knew in life that makes our attraction to their physicality of death an easier one to explore.\u00a0 We collect the animals, name them, photograph them, prepare them for resting, and keep a physical part of them with us for remembrance.\u00a0 We have created our own methods of ritual that serve as respect towards the animal and as comfort to ourselves. –Trish Igo and Jill O’Brien \u00a0 \u00a0 [1] Scully, Matthew.\u00a0 Dominion<\/em>.\u00a0 St. Martin\u2019s Griffin: New York, 2002.<\/p>\n

Crowd of Drifters Images<\/a><\/p>\n

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Pet Dreams<\/a><\/h2>\n

Pet Dreams: \u00a0a collection of objects and experiences<\/em> (2006) is\u00a0a collaborative body of work by Trish Igo and Jill O’Brien illustrating our similar nightmares with a set-like installations that featured ceramic and robotic sculptures, sounds, mixed media, and found objects.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026I kept venturing back further, becoming more scared and sick as I thought about my old pets I somehow had forgotten.\u00a0 All my animals were in this one room on several tables.\u00a0 Glass and plastic cages had fused themselves together, and plenty had plastic tunnels filled with water, debris, and pieces of hamsters that learned to live independently of an entire animal.\u00a0 Some lived in water; some were just buried in dry heaps of bedding and fur.\u00a0 Some reproduced in abominable ways\u2014some were barely alive.\u00a0 They were abandoned by me and suffering at my hand\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

–artist 1<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026My shelves are stuffed with nostalgic objects and toys and feelings from childhood.\u00a0 All the furniture is the yellow and gold girl-set and my blue toy chest is there and full of wonderful possessions.\u00a0 My ferrets are running around, happily and mischievously investigating these stacks of socks and toys\u2026I search the bedroom and notice that it turns into a haphazard lab with tanks and aquariums and buckets all clumped together with tunnels and filters.\u00a0 I see charlie.\u00a0 Her hair is gone and her skin is translucent and mucousy.\u00a0 I see sammy in a filthy tank, laying in an inch of water.\u00a0 He too is bloated and hairless, and as I look in, horrified, his red eyes roll toward me accusingly and full of hate\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

–artist 2<\/p>\n

\"Jill<\/a>This installation is based on the pet-anxiety dreams that we both share.\u00a0 In discussing and relating our dreams to each other, we discovered that our pet dreams had a myriad of obscure details in common.\u00a0 We began to investigate our lifestyles and our pasts for clues to their origins and meanings.\u00a0 The dreams all seem to revolve around the burden that our pets have on us emotionally, our fears of neglecting them, and the guilt that we have from feeling so overwhelmed by our responsibilities to them.\u00a0 In the dreams, these emotions are delivered by horrible imagery of abuse or neglect in bizarrely nostalgic settings and past places.<\/p>\n

We believe that these dreams we share are not only inspired by the fact that we own and adopt pets as we have over our life, but also by the fact that we are both collectors and have a distinct need to collect, categorize, and organize things that we find and own.\u00a0 We view our mundane findings as relics and our collections as rituals. \u00a0We obtain, keep, treasure, and are simultaneously plagued by the endless stacks, piles and shelves of objects and oddities that we can\u2019t seem to let go. \u00a0Caring for and living with the objects and pets we are compelled to keep can instigate an overwhelming cycle of anxiety. \u00a0We believe this sense of anxiety is most powerful when it is presented in our dreams.<\/p>\n

Our work aims to replicate these dreams.\u00a0 Each part of the installation uses ceramics, plastics, and mechanized media amidst found objects and furniture to communicate a specific feeling or memory that we have experienced in dreams of animals.\u00a0 We arrange the show in a narrative format and create transitions to show the structure of dreams, moving from one idea or scene into another. The store, disintegrating from a perfect merchandise utopia into an absurd and horrific conglomeration of objects, false animals, and real specimens is meant to illustrate that particular feeling in a dream or nightmare when things begin to feel horribly wrong.\u00a0 The uncanny we experience in dreams is so unsettling because it best simulates those moments in our routine life where a surreal shock in the everyday reminds us subconsciously of our impending mortality.\u00a0 The pet dreams show us that regardless of how well we tend to our responsibilities to our loved ones, we can never prevent their deaths, or our own. \u00a0–Trish Igo and Jill O’Brien<\/p>\n

Pet Dreams Images<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 Creature Comfort Creature Comfort\u00a0(2010-present) is an ongoing, collaborative body of work by Trish Igo and Jill O’Brien, featuring ceramics, taxidermy, preserved specimens, installation art, soft sculpture, mixed media, and found objects. All animals (fur, bone, specimens, etc.) were acquired post-mortem.\u00a0\u00a0The artists were not directly or indirectly involved in any of the animals\u2019 deaths.\u00a0\u00a0All taxidermy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":435,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jillcobrien.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/437"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jillcobrien.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jillcobrien.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jillcobrien.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jillcobrien.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=437"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jillcobrien.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":770,"href":"https:\/\/jillcobrien.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/437\/revisions\/770"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jillcobrien.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jillcobrien.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}