Toning Systems Volume II gathers new and recent works in sculpture and drawing by Baltimore-based interdisciplinary artist Danni O’Brien. The exhibition borrows its title from the pervasive language of “toning”—a term found in packaging, advertising, and patents for machines and apparatuses specifically marketed to women, and mines the material culture of health, exercise, and domesticity.

About Danni O’Brien

Danni O’Brien is a queer, interdisciplinary artist based in Baltimore, Maryland. Their practice involves ongoing cycles of deconstruction and reconstruction, echoing both queer identity formation and speculative world-building. O’Brien works across many processes, including gardening, papermaking, cyanotype, ceramic handbuilding, mold making and casting, metalworking, woodworking, and found object assemblage to create post-human objects and worlds. Currently, their work focuses on post-use, at-home exercise equipment and other self-improvement technologies to generate cyborgs that collapse the boundaries between vintage and futuristic, sexual and mechanical, and synthetic and natural. O’Brien’s recent honors include the Trawick Grand Prize (2025), a nomination for the Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2025), and the Windgate Fellowship with Vermont Studio Center (2025). They have also been awarded recent residencies with Byrdcliffe Colony (2023, 2024), Wassaic Project (2019, 2023), Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency (2023, 2024), and The Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (2024).

www.danielleobrienart.com
@danni_obrien_art