|
Review
of Two Kindred Spirits from the Boston Globe
by
Cate McQuaid on Wednesday October 26:
Suffering and vulnerability, mind and body
In 2008, John O'Reilly, a master of graceful and slyly potent photomontage,
went to Dogtown--long ago neighborhood of Gloucester, now a woodsy
area known for its boulders--to take pictures. He knew that Marsden
Hartley, the restless Modernist painter, had spent time in Dogtown
in the 1930s. Consequently, O'Reilly, whose works sometimes probe
the more bruised stories of cultural history, made his "Dogtown
Hartley Series."
Independent curator Trevor Fairbrother has put together "John
O'Reilly, Marsden Hartley: Two Kindred Spirits," a moving and
provocative exhibit at Howard Yezerski Gallery, that highlights
O'Reilly's Dogtown series and other photomontages alongside spare,
fevered drawings by Hartley, on loan from the Bates College Museum
of Art in Lewiston, Maine.
The boulders play a big part in the works of both artists. Hartley's
pen-and-ink drawing depicting Dogtown, "Untitled. Subject:
Rock, Walls, Twisted Trees, Blueberry Bushes," sets the big
rocks undulating in the middle of a scene buzzing with the tangled
lines of foliage and the speckles of grass and berries.
O'Reilly, who breathtakingly shuffles shreds of art-historical imagery
and personal narrative, here weaves his own photos of boulders with
images of sculptural figures, such as Michelangelo terra cotta in
"Dogtown Hartley Series 1/24/09." The figure is not perfectly
clear, but you sense a shoulder, a haunch, as man struggles to emerge
from stone.
In the forefront of O'Reilly's virtuosically assembled, "Dogtown
Hartley Series, 10/29/09," a man--whose legs and feet, clad
in ballet slippers, might be from an old photo of Nijinsky, a regular
player in this artist's work--lies writhing before a jagged rock
face. Above, ancient classical columns stand, fall, and meld seamlessly
with the rock; a house topples into a William Morris textile design.
A snapshot in a bottom corner captures young men on a dock, two
of them shirtless--like the men in many of Hartley's drawings.
That artist's pieta, "Badly Bruised--Who Is He?" shows
a small legion of square-shouldered, shirtless men cradling a nearly
naked figure. This hangs beside O'Reilly's own "Pieta"
from 1995, in which the artist holds a naked Christ
O'Reilly, who is in his early 80s, is gay, and he threads his work
with homoerotic references borrowed from everything from Renaissance
painting to porn. Hartley is thought to have been gay and closeted,
and he certainly celebrated the brawn of the male body.
What Hartley here expresses in deft, simple, electric line drawings,
and O'Reilly in lush photomontages, is the same: the suffering of
flesh and psyche, the pain of sacrifice and a mystical expression
of vulnerability.
For further information please contact Howard Yezerski Gallery
617.262.0550 Tuesday - Saturday 10-5:30pm
|
