Portrait of Bryan O'Neill
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Bryan O'Neill

About the Artist

Bryan O’Neill is an intermedia artist in Baltimore, Maryland. He earned his MFA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in Intermedia and Digital Art in 2019 and his BFA in photography at Towson University in 2016. Utilizing sculpture, photography, and performance to create work which explores intersections of mankind and Nature. Focusing on American ideas of wilderness, survivalism, manliness, and absurdity he explores the ecological thought and the performance of masculinity in the culture of the outdoorsman. His process focuses heavily upon repetition to create installations which reveal hours of meditative effort through salvaged wood, camp rope, and resin.

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Artist's Statement

In researching the history of wilderness in America I explored the idea that as Americans, our cultural attitude towards our natural environment has been shaped and influenced by the mindsets and actions of the pioneers and frontiersmen who came before us. I argue that their fearful and destructive stance towards uncultivated land is still imbued in the minds of many Americans who claim to be outdoors enthusiasts and yet deny climate change and support politicians who are actively campaigning against the protection and preservation of our environment. Through the creation of several sculptural works, as well as personal forays into “wilderness,” I attempt to understand and overcome the destructive masculine tendencies of my country’s frontier forefathers. Only through a changing of mindsets and an acceptance of co-existence can we accept and understand our place within the interconnected mesh of all living things.

Featured Work

Photos

The vector-based Monstera Deliciosa was designed to be completely scale-able and modular. Fully lasercut from transparent acrylic this artificial houseplant can grow.
Work in progress. Playing with ideas rooted in my history as a Boy Scout, I made a flail based on knightly medieval weaponry but replaced the spiked ball with a monkeys fist knot. I am playing on ideas of absurd masculinity within chivalry and outdoorsmanship.
I used dense and bulky logs to create sculptural tools and engaged in absurd attempts to create prints with them. These heavy logs are salvaged remnants of tree-clearing operations that I strip of bark, to which I add makeshift metal handles fabricated from steel rebar. Here a log, once part of a living organism, lays flayed and dejected. Stripped of its bark, it ceases to exist as it once did, a symbol of strength and resilience, and becomes a grotesque and vulnerable extremity. It recalls a severed human limb. The violence done serves to humanize and diminish the vast power of the human view of Nature, laying that ideal low, to be held in our balance. The point of balance on which the stripped log lies is the human equivalent of strength: concrete.
Violent Ends is a two-part installation. On one wall hangs 50 headless axe handles, hand-carved from salvaged walnut, oak, cherry, and maple wood. Mounted on the wall opposite are 50 cast-epoxy axe heads
Shelter is a 6’ x 7’ knitted sheet consisting of over 3,000 feet of fused synthetic polypropylene rope. Draped over a log, this 60-pound survival blanket becomes an absurd shelter.
Flora Series