Brendan O’Shaughnessy is a Chicago-based visual artist and material researcher driven by concerns of climate change, technoscience, and industrial extraction. Through his expansive material approach, O’Shaughnessy’s sculptures challenge what we consider to be beautiful, perverse, and sensuous in our changing world.
He received his MFA in Fiber & Material Studies at the Tyler School of Art & Architecture at Temple University in 2024. He received his BFA in Sculpture and his BS in Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2022.
O’Shaughnessy has exhibited work in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Munich. O’Shaughnessy has received residencies from Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Acre, and Sculpture Space.
Statement
How do shifting multi-species relationships – such as invasive species, transgenic organisms, cultured species, and extinction – reshape our understanding of self? To be human is a relational condition; our existence and evolution are fundamentally shaped by our complex relationships to other organisms and our shared environment. We are simultaneously creators and destroyers, liberators and subjugators, and rational and irrational beings. How do we navigate these evolutionary and epistemological conceptions of self in a rapidly transforming world?
I use material as a critical point of analysis to challenge what we consider to be beautiful, perverse, and sensuous. My material approach spans fish leather, bioplastics, cast aluminum, satin, and steel. By blurring boundaries between the industrial and biological, human and nonhuman, and self and environment, my work examines how we control, extract from, and systematize the biophysical world. My sculptures invite us to experience attraction and aversion, as well as curiosity, kinship, and otherness; they invite us to imagine a more livable multi-species future.
