O’Neil’s population of men — devoid of women and children, and thus doomed to end with the last man — personify a state of incessant destruction brought upon the world by a horde of automatons hell-bent on a futile yet predictable aspiration to conquer nature. This quest would be quixotic and even charming were it not hurtling us towards the end of everything. But O’Neil is neither Noah nor Cassandra. Her pictures aren’t meant to warn us or save us. She is, rather, quite zen about us getting what we’ve got comin’. 

 

— Christopher Blay, Glasstire

“A penchant for drawing clouds without names underscores ONeil’s sensitivity to nature and her keenly honed observational skills. Having come of age in the tornado alleys of Nebraska and North Texas, O’Neil has spent many years as a volunteer weather watcher, and among her first signature drawings from 1997 is a night sky riven by a bolt of lightning. As her work matured, O’Neil’s personal engagement with local meteorology became inextricably enmeshed with the larger terrors of climate change. Her everyman figures stand appalled and bewildered before the world’s undoing, unable to help themselves or one another.”

 — Alison de Lima Greene

Such far-flung influences are a defining characteristic of O'Neil's oeuvre. Her works, both the massive and the intimate, contain a trove of art-historical easter eggs, stacked like cairns within her ravaged world. O'Neil's plentiful nods to humanity's collective creative output provides a counterbalance to the senseless destruction that otherwise dominates the work. Each drawing reads like a page or chapter from a particularly violent history book in which platoons of tiny men attempt to dominate animals, the environment, and each other. Emotionally neutral, they appear to be acting on autopilot, completely unanxious about their constant proximity to certain doom. Whether in the form of heights, hooves, fists, and floods, death comes for them all.

Sometimes I wonder if I conjure it up; horrible things seem to follow me when it comes to Mother Nature. But I respect it,” O’Neil admitted during the exhibition’s press walkthrough. Pulling from her experiences of extreme weather, her monumental drawings are characterized by harsh, snowy landscapes, barren trees, and anthropomorphic bodies of water that curl and stretch out like hands.

 

— Meghan N Liberty, Hyperallergic