StoreR. O'Donnell
R. O’Donnell works in photography, painting, and mixed media. Night streets, empty corridors, and close studies of flowers in gray form a practice of looking at the hours and surfaces most people pass through without seeing. He is based in New York City.
I photograph the city and the garden in the hours when they stop performing.
Night and early morning strip a place down to structure: brick, steel, wet pavement, a single storefront light, scaffolding that turns an alley into a corridor. The In Between NYC pictures come from those intervals—blocks after the crowd has gone, tunnels of construction, empty interiors, the space between buildings rather than the buildings themselves. I am looking for the city as it exists when almost no one is using it.
The same impulse runs through Dewitt In Gray. Those photographs move in close on flowers and bark until they become architecture: folds, veins, thorns, the weight of a bloom against dark leaves. Shot in black and white and printed as archival pigment, they treat a rose the way the street photographs treat a water tower or a graffiti wall—as something that has a life of its own if you stay with it long enough.
I work across photography, painting, and mixed media. The paintings—The Boys Who Brunch, The Spiral, the untitled canvases—hold the same concern in a different register: faces and fields built from mark and color rather than lens and hour. What connects the work is attention to what sits just outside ordinary looking. Landscape and urban space. Found surfaces. The environmental fact of a place after the event has ended.
I am less interested in spectacle than in the charged quiet of a life, a street, or a flower continuing when the lights are supposed to be out.