Toning Systems Volume II 
Works by Danni O'Brien

May 1st - June 6th, 2026
Opening reception May 1st, 6-8PM

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. O’Brien scavenges discarded exercise equipment, outdated patent schematics, and abandoned home goods, grafting them with gourds to create enigmatic assemblages and speculative machines. The gourds, simultaneously smooth and warty, breast-like and phallic, are cultivated from seed, dried, stained, and replicated in redolent recycled candle wax or aluminum, serving as proxies for bodies in flux and transformation. Thigh masters, cellulite removers, singular dumbbells, TikTok spine stretchers, and cold therapy knee pads are transformed into cyborgs and relics, collapsing the boundaries between vintage and futuristic, synthetic and natural, mechanical and sexual.

Recent drawings ground the exhibition, borrowing source material and inspiration from a century of patent applications for at-home exercise equipment, especially those depicting feminine figures interacting with these devices. The images act as time capsules, archiving beauty standards and gender norms of their eras through details such as fashion, hairstyles, and body types, and evoke associations with torture devices, BDSM, and cyborgs. Following patent conventions, dotted lines indicate possible movement, activation, or transformation, while solid lines in original patents distinguish machines. O’Brien blurs these boundaries, merging bodies and machines into swirling constellations of intersecting dashed lines to create cyborg diagrams.

Toning Systems Volume II conjures a world of dysfunctional, dizzying, and delusional machines—contraptions that mutate and resist the very ideas of access, function, and control that spawned them. Queer in their irreverence, material misbehavior, and otherworldly affect, these works coalesce as stream-of-consciousness assemblages over many months and across multiple residency studios, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, Byrdcliffe Colony, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, and Vermont Studio Center. Inherently precarious, counter-balanced, and cantilevered, the works depend on themselves to remain upright, foregrounding instability, maintenance, and vulnerability as central conditions. Oscillating between absurdist contraption and intimate proxy, these works call us to reconsider the histories encoded in material and our intimate relationship to consumption, self, and machine.

About the artist -

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