Congratulations to Jack O’Brien, the inaugural recipient of the Chelsea Arts Club Trust Prize.
In 2022, the Trust raised sufficient funds to offers an £8000 prize to a young, recent graduate or emerging artist, curator, writer or designer in London with an emphasis on supporting BIPOC, trans, non-binary or LGBTQI+ creative practitioners. The trustees invited 3 practitioners from the field to nominate an artist or other creative. A panel of esteemed judges from the artworld then considered the nominations and selected a recipient of the prize. The winner received the £8000 award and club membership, the other two nominees received a £1000 award in recognition of their nomination.
For this year’s award, TV Personality, Academic and writer, Dr David Dibosa, Curator of Art Angel, London, Marina Doritos, and Art Writer and Cultural Strategist, Khuroum Bukhari nominated Shiraz Bayjoo, Carl Gent and Jack O’Brien. We were delighted to see Jack O’Brien awarded the full prize by our panel of judges this year. This Panel included curator of Mosaic Rooms, London, Siegrun Salmanian, Curator of ICA, London, Sara Sassanelli, and Curator of Chelsea Space Gaia Giacomelli.
O’Brien’s work explores the relationships between the built environment, material culture and marginalised aesthetics. Drawing on industrial, fashion design, image-making and architectural practice, the sculptures consider the political and ideological histories of consumption and the production of desire.
O’Brien speaks of objects and materials as ‘eloquent texts’ that encode cultural and historical meaning. The work touches upon taboo, fetish and the commodification of queer aesthetics drawing links between whiteness, masculinities and political and body fascism in gay culture.
Khuroum Bakhari said of the nomination “O Brien’s arresting work materialises an encounter between two ongoing infiltrations that destabilise the increasingly divided, public space: queerness and neoliberalism. Veering between delicacy and violence, his complex meta-constructions relay an architecture of competing desires showing how sexuality moves alongside late-capitalist making”.
Instagram: @_jackobrien_
Website: jackobrien.net
Jack O’Brien, Lover (detail), 2021, steel wire, clay, white vest, football socks, barbed wire, installation view, dimensions variable.