#art 912: I’m Trying To Tell You

Maggie Mullin O’Hara is a multimedia artist from Pittsburgh, PA, currently based in the South; specifically, Columbia, SC and Savannah, GA. Her exhibition I’m Trying To Tell You incorporates the mediums of video, performance, photography, sculpture and installation. The show features both old and new works from the artist, experienced through projections, monitors, light-boxes, photographs, and includes a site-specific sculptural video installation featuring a yearlong performance piece created specifically for the show. The newer works embody a departure from a previous sense of anonymity; the artist now asking the viewer to experience, more intimately, these shared vulnerabilities with her. She is asking that we endure with her, that we feel with her, that we cry with her… for you, for me, for her, for him, for them, for us.

O’ Hara’s work exists as a hybrid form, borrowing from the traditions of the mediums of video, photography, performance and installation. It explores ideas of inter-connectedness between the physical body and experiences of psychological balance and imbalance while proposing the possibility of fulfillment through the indeterminate. It challenges the trans-subjective nature of our roles in the experience of the work, as well as the potentiality for indetermination as change — as having the capability to reverse pain into pleasure, or more radically, to collapse distinctions between the two. The work proposes the ultimatum of indeterminacy leading towards an artistic, affective production, and away from any possibility of being limited, distinct or settled.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website