JOHN
O'REILLY: ASSEMBLIES OF MAGIC
September 3-December 29, 2002
John O'Reilly, Watching Courbet, 1985, Polaroid
and halftone montage, collection of Donna Harkavy and Jonathan Price
John
O’Reilly has literally and figuratively cut and pasted his way
into art history in intimate kaleidoscopic compositions that montage
photographic fragments of masterworks of the past with such elements
as fragments of photographs of O’Reilly’s own body; cut up
pictures of various props such as shards of glass, push pins, and miniature
bric-a-brac; images cut from porn magazines; and much more. With crystalline
visual audacity he has explored the tremulous edges where art and pornography,
religious ecstasy and sexual ecstasy, the artist and the voyeur, joy
and pathos, the past and the present, creation and destruction exchange
places. His influences include the earlier fantasist collagist and fellow
time traveler Joseph Cornell and the writer Jean Genet whose Our Lady
of the Flowers with its rapturous religiosexuality and interchanges
of fictional narrator and author proved liberating to O’Reilly—as
did the unfettered imagination of mental patients in Worcester to whom
he taught art for so long.
O’Reilly’s
early art making began with a painterly figurative expressionism in
the mid 1950s. Subsequently, during a stay in Spain, he found himself
without adequate art supplies and began tearing up copies of Art News
sent by his parents. O’Reilly soaked the shredded text and reproductions
in water and pastel, then arranged these fragments into blurry collages.
Serendipitously brought about by a lack of conventional materials,
this
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transforming
of destruction (tearing, fragmenting) into creation and the reordering
of art reproductions into new meaning and context would become a defining
characteristic of O’Reilly’s work starting in the late 1960s.
Hybridizing half tone photo reproductions of figures cut from books and
magazines and arranging them on a black casein ground, O’Reilly set
out to create his own mythology—starting with lyric personifications
of constellations. A decade later, he began to incorporate photographs
of himself (baby pictures, photo automat self portraits, or photos taken
by his partner) into his mythologizing. In this way he could join Walt
Whitman in conversation or graft his head and torso onto a Greek sculpture
of Apollo.
John O'Reilly, As an Apollo, 1981,
Photograph
and halftone montage, Courtesy of Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston
John
O'Reilly: Assemblies of Magic Continued...
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