Stringer’s Ridge
by Andrew O’Brien
February 7 – 28, 2025
Please join us for the opening reception:
Friday February 7, 6-8pm
at IAO Gallery (932 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA. 90012)
Stringer’s Ridge reflects on the act of perceiving a dense and horizonless landscape – one that resists the conventions of a traditional pictorial scene, while pointing to the value in the indeterminate, and the potential of working within and through a kind of unknowable complexity.
Consider the honeysuckle plant which overwhelms the forests of Stringer’s Ridge as well as countless wooded areas across the United States. It’s two most common forms – lonicera japonica and lonicera maackii, Japanese honeysuckle and Amur honeysuckle respectively – are not native to the US. They were introduced in the early-nineteenth century for ornamental and erosion control purposes before they became one of the most recognizable scenes and scents of the woods and woodland edges of North America.
A process called enfleurage is used to extract the aromatic components of the honeysuckle flower. It not only yields a one-to-one replication of the scent of the flower itself, but it also involves a method that directly relates to the notion of indexicality so prevalent in photography. Each round of flower collection is described as an exposure, done on specially built frames that are “sensitized” with a semi-solid fat that binds to the aromatic compounds of the flower when they are laid out on the surface of the frame. The scent is then extracted in a manner that also follows much of the logic of analogue photographic development.
Synthetic tree trunks wrapped in honeysuckle vines are joined by enfleurage frames, both of which contain the aromatics derived from honeysuckle plants collected on site. Photographs in artist frames depict the complex matrix of forest understory with marks overlaid onto the images that reference the vernacular of surveying and wayfinding. Within the shallow field of the print, the combination of marks, surface, and vegetation, creates the possibility of a new space – one that moves between surface and depth, or the singular and the undifferentiated.
Together, the cumulative effect is a study in the limits of replication, and a meditation on the act of sectioning off, extraction, part-to-whole, and the logic of study and control which dominate western means of understanding much of the natural world, and that which led to the visible and olfactory landscape of Stringer’s Ridge.
Image: Untitled, 2024. FDM PLA print on walnut base with custom pedestal. 11” x 11” x 15”; 12” x 12” x 45” with pedestal. Honeysuckle aromatics (not visible in image) contained within 3” x .5” circular glass dish on walnut base inside of tree trunk segment.
ABOUT ANDREW O’BRIEN
Andrew O’Brien’s artistic practice draws from lived experience to examine the organization and perception of physical space — especially as it relates to landscape and the built environment. His work is informed by the history and symbolic potential of materials, as well as the shifting incarnations of the photographic image. Works range from experimental publications, to photographs, video, and installation.
He has exhibited widely, including at the Houston Center for Photography, Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee, California State University Northridge galleries, and the Art Museum of Northern Illinois University, among others. In 2021 O’Brien was named a Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellow. From 2014 to 2024 O’Brien served as an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and he is currently based in Austin, Texas.