Expensive Attention: The Slow Looking Tradition in Art
In a moment where visual culture is driven by speed—by—swipe, scroll, algorithm, and spectacle, Expensive Attention invites viewers to slow down. To look again. To listen, materially, to what art, and painting specifically, can still do. Across four gallery spaces at the Saint Kate-the Arts Hotel, this exhibition brings together artists working in direct opposition to a distracted age. These works are not made to keep up; they are made to linger on in our imaginations.
Featuring monotypes by Olivia Hiester, an immersive installation by Blake O’Brien, sumi ink drawings by Francie Cook, and a film by Nick Cajori, this cycle also includes the group show Imagined Landscapes, with paintings by Tucker Love, Liam Murphy-Torres, and Sutton Allen. Together, these artists share a commitment to making slow, thoughtful, embodied work—painting against the tide of quick content and digital sheen.
Attention is the medium in this cycle of shows. Materials matter: oil paint, ink, paper, wood, and cloth. These are works with weight. You can almost feel the residue of the turpentine and smell the linseed oil. The surfaces are not flat screens—they're built up, scraped down, lived with. The image isn’t delivered; it’s uncovered, worked for, hard-won. Across figuration and abstraction, installation and cinema, these artists ask something rare of us: presence. Not just to see the work, but to meet it. To take time. To sit with what doesn’t explain itself right away. Because when information is cheap, attention is expensive.
Wunderbett
by Blake O’Brien
Wunderbett is part of an ongoing project by Blake O’Brien probing the history of the museum and the practice of collecting by way of the wunderkammer, or “cabinet of curiosities”. The painting presented in The Vitrine imagines a sort of sickbed for all history’s odalisques—one in which their identities and their spiritual functions as cultural objects and images have been flattened, frozen, embalmed, and conflated, as in some rudimentary imaging of Sid’s Franken-toys ascended to the bed-on-high for hospice care.
Blake O’Brien lives in Ridgewood, Queens. He received his BFA from the University of Southern Mississippi and his MFA from Indiana University. He has taught at both USM and IU, and has been invited as a visiting artist at IU and Kent Place School in Summit, NJ. He currently works and teaches at the New York Studio School. His awards include the Mary Jane McIntire Endowed Fellowship at Indiana University, a Mississippi Arts Commission Fellowship, and a Chapter Career Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters. His work has been shown in New York at Essex Flowers Gallery, Greene House Gallery, O’Flaherty’s, and Dōdōmu Gallery, as well as at Delphian Gallery, London, UK; Kent Place School Gallery, Summit, NJ; The Fuller Projects, Bloomington, IN; Lotus World Music and Arts Festival, Bloomington, IN; Saladino Gallery, Covington, LA; and the Meridian Museum of Art, Meridian, MS, among others. O’Brien has been featured in New American Paintings, Art Maze Magazine, and Greene House Magazine.
