A gold cord drops from a wall-mounted assembly, crosses a freestanding white panel, and pools in loose loops on the parquet floor. In Deferral, it suggests connection, transfer, the possibility of power or flow. The parquet matters: its repeated units make the cord’s coiling more deliberate, more fully stopped. Instead it settles into a posture of rest. The cord does not fail. It simply does not arrive.
What Leisure suspends is not only use, but the intimacy objects accumulate through use. Jack O’Brien builds his sculptures from things that already know what contact is: a horn shaped for breath, headphones shaped for ears, bottles shaped for pouring, cords shaped for connection, bulbs shaped for grip. Nothing in the exhibition has been stripped of that knowledge. What has been withheld is completion. The objects remain close to the body without allowing the actions they imply to occur.
O’Brien’s work has often been read through queer materiality, precarity, and the bodily residue of everyday things. That language holds, and it has been earned. But here those pressures settle into a more exacting condition. What matters is not simply that use has been interrupted. What matters is that the closeness use leaves behind remains fully legible after the action has stopped.
A horn, headphones, a rubber bulb, a bottle, a cord: each is built around a specific site of contact—mouth, ear, hand, grip, flow, containment. O’Brien’s object world maps where the body comes close: mouth to horn, ears to headphones, hand to bulb, liquid to bottle, current to cord.
In Permission, the horn still carries the shape of breath, but the mouthpiece has been replaced by a rubber bulb shaped for the hand. The object keeps its expectation of contact, but not the one it was made for: not breath, but grip. The substitution is comic in its wrongness. That flicker is part of the work’s charge. Elsewhere, headphones hang from the wall with their cord dropping away from them. The gesture feels already half-begun: lift, settle, adjust. The work stops it before it can complete itself. What disappears is not the memory of contact but its fulfillment.
Filled with amber resin, the bottles retain the appearance of something that could be poured, shared, consumed. The color stays close to wine, to warmth, to the body. But resin does more than fix the liquid. It seals suspension, turning what should flow into preservation—a record of stopped time. The memory of use travels in the color. Across the room, that amber carries the persistence of warmth without delivering it. In Posture, resin-filled bottles are held in a suspended rack, organized but never connected into a functioning system. In Tone III, a single bottle stands on the floor, thickened at its base with sellotape and cellophane, held in place without activation. Elsewhere, in the floor work Permission, the inverted horn stands above two resin-filled bottles that serve as its only support. The bottles no longer hold anything. They bear.
Containment gives way to bearing. Transfer gives way to rest. Contact survives, but in altered form.
Across the exhibition, objects remain distinct, held together by cords, brackets, suspension, or pressure. What accumulates instead is relation: elements leaning, looping, hanging, or resting against one another without merging. The works neither assemble into a unified structure nor disperse into expressive disorder. They stay near one another once their ordinary uses have ended, and that nearness is what the work is finally organized around.
In the main installation, O’Brien introduces a freestanding white panel that behaves like a new wall inside the Regency interior at Morena di Luna. It does not announce itself through contrast; it echoes the space closely enough that, for a moment, it almost passes as belonging. That half-second of near-continuity holds. The panel’s whiteness matches the surrounding walls, while the mounted work and trailing cord make its added status unmistakable. The fanlight centers behind it as though the panel had always been there.
Morena di Luna is a Regency house, and Regency houses were built to manage the distance between approach and arrival — rooms graduated by intimacy, admission staged rather than granted, proximity that never automatically converted into access. Entering the building did not mean full arrival. The fanlight already holding the inserted panel belongs to that system. When O’Brien introduces a panel that almost passes as belonging to the house, he is not working against the architecture but inside a building already organized around withheld completion. The viewer stands inside the same arrested approach the objects enact.
This is the show’s real achievement. It does not give the image of things about to give way. It gives the structures that keep relation active once use has been interrupted. The objects do not simply signal desire, intimacy, or bodily residue. They distribute those pressures across cords, bottles, brackets, supports, and surfaces, holding them close to the body while refusing to resolve them.
Leisure offers neither a picture of instability nor a resolved formal order. Taking an object out of use does not empty it. Contact is a structural condition here, not an event. In O’Brien’s hands, nothing has been lost. It has been kept in suspension.
