#this post is brought to you by realizing that neither my watercolors or my new gouache are labeled as non toxic

[venacesaur]

why are toxic paints still a thing......in 2024? come on guys

[rainsongdean]

you’re always golden to me

post-mockingjay / pre-epilogue everlark healing together, appreciating the sunset, and maybe even falling in love

"We should head back before it gets dark." Peeta's words rang out in the open air between them, but they were not enough to pull Katniss from her trance-like state.

It had been a rough day. Not enough so to be classified as a bad day, seeing as Katniss had found the motivation to move from the bed to the couch at some point in the afternoon. Now, though, watching the clouds paint watercolors in the sky seemed to bring her back to life. She was encapsulated by the sight.

"Not yet," she eventually spoke, her voice somewhat hoarse from not using it for a while. "I want to stay until it's over. Besides, we could walk home blindfolded from here."

It was true. Katniss had discovered the hill nestled in the woods behind Victor's Village not long after returning from the Capitol. She found solace in being embraced by the wilderness rather than being suffocated in her old home, so when she accidentally stumbled upon the tall mount that overlooked the wide plains and open sky, she knew she had found what she had subconsciously been searching for.

It had taken a few months before she brought Peeta to her secret spot. He'd only returned to District 12 a few days before she had found the hill, and they both needed some time to warm up to each other again. But one day, after suffering through a particularly vivid flashback that ended with him handcuffed to one of Haymitch's spare cages for his geese, Katniss figured it would do them both good to escape into the forest for a while.

That was the first night they watched the sunset from the hill. It had been slightly uncomfortable, sitting inches apart on the dewy grass, no attempt at conversation made by either party. Eventually, Peeta suggested they return home to make dinner before it got too late, but Katniss insisted that she could tell by the shape of the clouds that they would put on an impressive show.

As usual, she was not wrong.

It was the most vibrant spectacle either of them had seen - far more breathtaking than any Capitol party or fireworks display. Sure, they had both watched the sun go down in 12 before, but their view had always been clouded by the thick layer of dust in the air from the mines or obstructed by the cluster of buildings stacked practically on top of one another. Here on their hill, nothing stood between them and the sky. Beyond that, the best part was they got to share it together, just the two of them. 

Since that night, the pair made an effort to hike the two-mile trek to the hill at least once a week, though they typically found themselves there more often than that. Katniss still liked to visit the spot alone, sometimes using the safe space to speak aloud to Prim or Finnick and imagine what they would say back. Other times she just enjoyed the silence.

Peeta, too, ventured to the hill a few times by himself. He had tried on several occasions to paint the landscape, and while he was able to perfect the morning glow and mid-afternoon sun, he couldn't capture the colors of nightfall that he most desired to paint.

Despite the significance that the holy ground held for each of them individually, neither one could deny that they preferred to visit the hill together. Katniss had been unofficially living with Peeta for weeks now, and they even shared a bed most nights, but there was a different breed of intimacy that came with being in the woods, nestled in their own little corner of the universe. 

"Fine," Peeta sighed contentedly, breaking the silence again. "We can stay as long as you'd like." With that, he leaned toward the picnic basket they had brought and reached in, shoving aside the empty containers that once held a selection of berries, cheeses, and breads to reveal a neatly folded fleece blanket he had stashed in the bottom. "I came prepared," he announced with a sense of pride.

Katniss briefly pulled her gaze from the view for the first time since the sun had begun its descent to offer Peeta a small smile of gratitude. The gesture warmed his heart with the blaze of ten thousand sunsets.

Taking care to wrap the soft cover around their legs, Peeta pulled the fabric up to their chests and then eased his back to the ground until he was laying horizontal on the hill. Katniss followed suit so they were both engulfed by the blanket.

Their new angle only served to better showcase the colors stretching endlessly above them. One hue in particular transported Katniss back to a seemingly ancient memory of the two of them.

"Orange. Muted... like a sunset." Katniss didn't break her eye contact with the sky but smirked to herself as she spoke.

Peeta nudged her shoulder playfully in response, easily picking up on what she was referring to. Their conversation on the train about favorite colors was one of the first to come back to him after he had been rescued from the Capitol. Shifting slightly toward Katniss, he reached out and twisted his finger gently around a stray strand of hair that had escaped from her braid. "You're so poetic when you quote me," he mused sarcastically.

"Well, your choice of favorite color is much more poetic than Effie’s choice of wig," she quipped. It was ironic how some of her and Peeta's best conversations had happened in the midst of some of the worst times of their lives. And yet, there they were: safe and relatively happy, just two kids trying to piece themselves back together with some pastel paints, cheese buns, and hidden hills. It may not have been anything profound, but it was living, and Katniss figured that, for time being, that would be enough.

She inhaled deeply, trying to absorb the moment. They had reached the peak of the sunset when every particle in the air seemed to glisten from the giant star's final attempt to remain on the topside of the world. There was only one word to describe it.

"Everything is golden."

And, for an instant, it was.

But as the sun succumbed to the pull of dusk, the raging reds and oranges that had scorched the sky swiftly turned to delicate pinks and purples, paving the way for the black of night.

It was then that Katniss realized Peeta had been uncharacteristically quiet, his sunset commentary usually being much more prolific than hers. When she turned her head to the left to face him, she found he was already staring back at her, still toying with her hair. His deep blue eyes twinkled like he knew a secret and was about to let her in on it.

When they first met, that kind of look from Peeta overwhelmed her. Sometimes Katniss would catch him staring at her like she carried the world in her hands, or spun threads of gold with her words. It puzzled her, annoyed her, and at times even enraged her. But after his hijacking, it had been so rare for that young, innocent Peeta to reappear and give her that look which spelled out his love for her so plainly on his face, and she had grown to cherish it.

"I change my mind." For the third time that night, Peeta's voice sliced open the veil of silence that covered them. 

Katniss abruptly rose to a sitting position, an expression of confusion clouding her face as she leaned over Peeta's resting form. "What do you mean?"

"I change my mind," He repeated calmly, shrugging as if the answer to her question was obvious. "The sunset isn't my favorite shade of orange anymore."

Katniss bit her lip and furrowed her eyebrows, causing the wrinkles on her forehead to deepen. Peeta could tell she was trying to keep herself from challenging him, so he decided not to torture her any longer.

"You are my favorite shade of orange," he reached his hand up to caress her cheek, easing away the signs of worry that had risen on her face. "You, sitting here with the sun reflecting in your eyes, your skin glowing in the light." He lowered his voice to a whisper and retracted his hand, slowly guiding Katniss's head to rest on his chest so she could hear his heart beating. "The way you make me feel like I'm on fire inside, all the time."

Girl on fire. The words echoed in his mind and, although he did not dare speak them, he internally admitted they rang true. And it was in moments like those, as he held her under the night sky with millions of stars blazing above them, that he saw Katniss burn the brightest.

"Oh, shut up," she exhaled, turning away from him in an attempt to conceal the blush that had overtaken her smiling face, but Peeta didn't have to see it to know it was there. "You're so cheesy."

"Hey now," he feigned a hurt expression, "I thought you liked my cheese."

Katniss couldn't hide her outburst at his nonsense and they both fell into a fit of laughter together. They hadn't spoken much about what exactly their relationship status was at the moment, hesitant to put labels on anything, but he still wanted her to know how he felt about her. And while Katniss had never been proficient in using her words to convey her love, the way that she clung to Peeta, burying her head in his arm while gasping to regain her breath from laughing so hard, told him everything he needed to know.

"Come on, we should really head back before Haymitch gets worried." Peeta attempted once again to persuade Katniss to return home after they had both calmed down. His stomach was beginning to growl - the small rations of their picnic earlier weren't nearly enough to tide over his appetite until morning - and now that the sun had set, he'd much rather snuggle up with Katniss on their couch than on the cold, hard ground. And besides, while he didn't really think their mentor would be waiting up for them, he figured the argument might be enough to persuade her.

"Seeing as it's past 3 p.m., I think it's safe to say that Haymitch is passed out on his couch," Katniss countered, but her actions said otherwise as she began to gather herself up off the ground. Peeta knew she had a soft spot for the old man.

It took them a little over half an hour to walk home, leisurely following the path that their own footprints had created over time. Upon entering the house, Peeta made a beeline to the kitchen to heat up some leftover stew from the night before. While he ate, Katniss headed to Haymitch's house, opening the unlocked door to find him asleep in his living room as she had predicted. She pried the half-empty bottle from the arm that hung off the couch and set it on a nearby table before turning the lights out and closing his front door behind her.

She had recently made a habit of checking in on her friend, especially during the weeks when Effie travelled back to the Capitol for work. She knew he had done the same for her countless times. Haymitch never seemed to question why he would sometimes wake up with a blanket draped over him or a pillow propped beneath his head, and Katniss didn't plan on bringing it up. Like most things between the two of them, it went unsaid.

Later that evening, tucked under the covers of Peeta's bed - their bed - Katniss felt more at ease than she did most nights. Maybe it was the serenity of the particularly striking sunset, or maybe it was Peeta's roundabout confession of the feelings he still had for her. Either way, she was pleasantly content. 

On the other side of the mattress, as Peeta danced on the cusp of sleep, his mind dragged him back to something Katniss had said on the hill. Everything is golden. He knew what she meant; that the landscape had been blanketed by the radiance of the sunset. But he felt it was true in another sense, and that maybe this new phrase was an even more appropriate way to describe the true essence of Katniss Everdeen.

Before drifting off herself, Katniss heard Peeta mumble one last line of admiration, causing her to fall asleep with a smile ingrained on her lips.

"You're always golden to me."

[heister]

Response to Rolling Blackouts, by Sarah Glidden

It’s funny that they call you a refugee, as if you’ve found refuge. But you’re always on the move, so it’s not like you’ve really found refuge yet. But that’s the first thing you learn as a refugee: how to wait in line. How to be patient.         - Rolling Blackouts, Sarah Glidden

I remember where I was when Trump announced the first Muslim ban. I was sitting with a friend at Innisfree Poetry Bookstore in Boulder, CO, waiting for another friend to perform. I scrolled through Facebook distractedly while we waited together, until I read the news. Even now, I can’t quite explain it, but the closest I can come is to say I felt sick. Nauseous. Anxious. On the verge of a panic attack. Tears were already surging their way out of my body when I told my friend quietly that I had to go and caught the next bus home. There, I cried for hours until I finally read the news that a court had ruled against the ban. As we know now, that was nowhere near the end of the struggle, but at that moment it was enough for the panic and despair to subside long enough for me to fall asleep. I remember reading about the lawyers showing up at airports, and the frenzied thoughts of going to law school so I could help in this way too. I didn’t know what else to do. What could I, a graduate student in creative writing, do to help?

I am, of course, still searching for this answer, but in the immediate aftermath one possible answer came to me when an international NGO I used to work with posted a new program calling for volunteers at a refugee camp in Greece. I initially intended to go for a month, and ended up staying for five. One of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made was to stick to my teaching commitment in Colorado and leave Greece last December. Since I’ve come back home, and found myself economically bound to stay where I am for the moment, I’ve returned to this question, a question whose answer was simple, if not easy before: go, volunteer, bring back what you learned. But how to share what I’ve learned? How can I use writing to turn the tide in the refugee crisis? What can I do to help?

I bring up this context because reading Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, grapples with these same questions and brings them to the forefront for me once more. In 2010, graphic novelist Sarah Glidden traveled to Turkey, Iraq, and Syria with a group of journalists from the Seattle Globalist to seek answers to the question, “What is Journalism?” The result is this beautiful graphic narrative, released in 2016. When I first found out about this book, I was shocked, thinking her travels had been in the past two years; really, she went to Syria? When I found out the nonfiction narrative was now eight years old, I was at first disappointed; how would this reflect the current reality, when, in 2010, Syria was a prominent host of refugees and now is the home country of one of the largest groups of refugees and displaced people in the world?

It turns out that these questions were not lost on Glidden in the completion of this graphic narrative. It begins benignly enough, as Glidden contemplates the nature of journalism and her role in it as she departs on a two-month trip with her friends to cover stories about Iraqi refugees and internally displaced people. Their progressive mindset is complicated by the presence of a childhood friend who served in the U.S. Army in Iraq. This conflict comprises most of the first part of the book, as they all meet up in Turkey and plan out the stories they seek to pursue for the rest of the trip. I flagged the section set in Turkey as an excellent primer for the refugee crisis, especially a recorded interview with a UNHCR representative. The Iraq section is one of the longest, providing a brief history of the complicated tensions between Kurds and Arabs, within and beyond Iraq’s borders, and the impact of the Iraq war from numerous Kurdish and Arab Iraqi peoples’ perspectives. Throughout, Glidden presents, with both a self-reflexive eye and comfortingly soft watercolors, a painstakingly faithful representative of her travels and conversations with her peers and the people she meets overseas.

Where the narrative starts to levy its most powerful punch for me, is in the section set in Syria. In 2010, Damascus, Syria’s capital, was a thriving, modern city. Snow, not ash, fell as the group conducted interviews with displaced Iraqis seeking refuge in Syria. Knowing what Syria is now, knowing that I met friends in the Greek refugee camp that had fled from Damascus specifically, made this one of the most poignant and difficult parts of the book for me to read.

It reminded me of when I brought Rebecca Solnit’s “Letter to a Dead Man” to my first session of a composition class I taught in Colorado last spring. I brought it in part because I wanted to feel hopeful in our dark historical moment, but also because it was problematic in its own ways and would, I expected, foster meaningful dialogue. Quite simply, the piece, written in October 2011, didn’t hold up in January 2018. After reading it aloud as a class, I broke the ice in the conversation, opening up space for the students to critique as well as resonate, explaining that this was a hard piece for me to read because I have so many friends that I care deeply for who now have refugee status after fleeing Syria. The promise of the Arab Spring that Solnit wrote so eloquently about has undergone an ugly, brutal contortion in Syria, with a seemingly unending civil war that’s cost hundreds of thousands of lives and produced thirteen million refugees and displaced people. The country that was once known for its hospitality to refugees -- even though they were not legally obligated to, since they never signed the UN 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol updates -- is now the largest producer of refugees and displaced people in the world. The Iraqi refugees living in Syria have now mostly fled back to hostility, violence, and instability in their home country, and countless others living in Syria, whether citizen or refugee, have fled to Jordan, or are stuck along the Balkan route in Turkey, Greece, or Italy. Less than one percent have been resettled in new home countries, meaning almost all are living in refugee camps, squats, or slums, often in countries openly hostile to immigrants and refugees, and nearly always in vastly under-resourced situations that erode human dignity, lack in safety, and drive people, even children, to contemplate suicide.

From the moment I realized this book was set in 2010 and about Iraqi refugees, I feared it wouldn’t resonate, that it would have been made irrelevant by the passing of time and dramatically shifting circumstances in Syria. I was wrong. While there is no one singular “refugee experience,” there are, as Glidden highlights for us, so many stories to be told -- according to the most recent counts by the UNHCR, in fact, there are currently over 25.4 million refugees with stories to be told.

In a section called “Home,” Glidden reflects, albeit briefly, on the Arab Spring that began not long after she returned home. “Their situation has gotten even worse, and there’s nothing we can do about it. It feels like all that work was for nothing. It’s not even relevant anymore,” she laments to her friend, the journalist Sarah Stuteville. She responds, “The situation changing doesn’t make what they told us any less important….The best we can hope for is that the story gets passed along. The way the reader uses that story to understand the world is up to them.”

While, as a poet, essayist, and artist (rather than a journalist), I take a different view on my role in this crisis, this section resonated deeply with me nonetheless. I think we can hope for more, for better, or at least to strive for more, strive for better. However, there is something important in recognizing that one’s work might not reach many people, but that ripple effects do, in fact, exist. As a person who studies written communication and how it can be used to build a better world, I do believe that we can cause change through telling stories, and that there are a myriad of ways to do so. I don’t deceive myself into thinking that a single story I tell will end the war in Syria, but I do know that sharing voices of refugees, immigrants, and otherwise displaced people will ultimately help, and not hurt, the work of easing this crisis. As a friend and colleague of mine, who continues to work with refugee youth in Greece, told me recently, “There are thousands of people still arriving in Greece every year and mainstream media has stopped covering the crisis that is still occurring there. People can do so much by simply not forgetting that these youth are even there.”

I don’t forget, and neither does Glidden or her journalist friends. And so, in the face of such dire circumstances and staggering human cost, we persist in our work, we persist in our compassion, we persist in sharing and amplifying the voices of marginalized people around the world. Our work may not end the crisis outright, but nothing will ever change if we don’t do the work. Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts reminds us to keep. doing. the. work. Even when it seems irrelevant, even when it seems hopeless, persist. Even as we doubt our individual impact, to ask ourselves, as her friend Sarah relayed to her, “Is it better that this story is out there in the world than if it wasn’t? If the answer is yes, then you do it.”

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: John O’Reilly’s Radical Photomontages

John O’Reilly, “Eakins Posing” (2006), polaroid photomontage, gift of John O’Reilly and James Tellin (all images courtesy Worcester Art Museum)

WORCESTER, Massachusetts — It’s particularly poignant and fitting that John O’Reilly’s current retrospective at the Worcester Art Museum is titled A Studio Odyssey, as the artist’s studio for the past several decades had been his own modest home in Worcester, one shared with his partner, sculptor James Tellin, until they recently downsized to a more accessible and smaller home.

Although currently represented by Tibor De Nagy in New York, Miller Yezerski in Boston, and Hosfeldt in San Francisco, O’Reilly remained somewhat “undiscovered” until his inclusion in the 1995 Whitney Biennial. He has spent most of his professional career working away from art centers, and within the confines of a small space — both the upstairs bedroom in which he worked as well as the works themselves, all of them 3-by-3 feet or far smaller. As he told me, he “makes do” with what he has, not what might be.

I have visited John’s home studio several times over the past ten years. My partner, Robert Flynt, is also a photographer, O’Reilly has been something of a mentor to him, and we own several of his works. So I brought some familiarity, with the photographer, his imagery, and his studio, to this retrospective.

O’Reilly’s process and imagery reflects the accumulation, layering, and shifting perspectives that accompany a long career of looking while crafting a world in miniature. He understands, quite brilliantly, the optics of the small, the miniature, the literally cut-down-to size. His own works are assembled with images sliced-in from a variety of found sources, including found photos, art books, porn, and vintage coloring books. Truly the master of the Exacto knife, this work is meticulous and detailed, yet never gnomic. There is always something more to see, to discover, to associate.

John O’Reilly, “Two as Three” (1988) polaroid photomontage (courtesy the artist)

In A Studio Odyssey, the works are arranged in groupings of four to six, some paired with complementary works by artists such as William Hogarth. Just as the individual images within each montage communicate with one another, the pieces in these groupings let us mix and reassemble a larger body of work. This work reflects and refracts the history of art, as well as the history of looking, scanning, reading an image. Did John Berger ever see John O’Reilly’s work? I hope so.

What is the primary image? Is there one? This changes the longer you look, but not through optical tricks. The most intact or least deconstructed figures may initially seem central. Then you realize that the seamless background is itself composed of several cut up, ripped apart and reassembled images. All these surfaces create a vortex pulling you in. O’Reilly’s meticulous mixes of photographs and drawings are complex narratives. Although they presage digital photography, they are entirely analog — he owns neither a computer nor cell phone and works with found materials, Polaroid imagery, and his own “drugstore�� prints.

In O’Reilly’s work, the “hand” is more about scissors than shutters; what is snipped away, re-shaped, selected and layered. His “Scissors” (2016), an assemblage of drawings and a child’s coloring book with a large flat drawing of scissors, is a kind of guide to his process and principles. Found images of wildly diverse aesthetic and narrative power can be snuggled up next to each other and violently cut into each other in the same image.

O’Reilly’s work is an accumulation, or montage (his preferred term), that transmits something larger than its parts. It prompts us to foreground not the process (as in the “cut-up” approach of artist Bryon Gysin, for instance), but the totality of the image. Looking at “The Seer” (1979), I see in the young man’s face — probably torn from a porn magazine — tension, intimacy and surprising clarity.

John O’Reilly, “In a Dutch Dream” (1990), polaroid photomontage, Eliza S. Paine Fund

For “In a Dutch Dream” (1990) — a horizontal composition that feels almost like a triptych — O’Reilly (are those his arms too?) shares the foreground with a naked youth, whose own arm may be a cut-in of Caravaggio, while a Pierrot figure near a tiny duck toy in the bottom right corner stretches its arms diagonally. The work is dynamic and alive and emotional, yet it only hints at narrative. O’Reilly’s work can send the viewer on a chase after narrative closure. The photomontage “French Youth” (2005) has no readily identifiable “youth,” but rather shadows and a statue that could have been a young person but is so damaged that it now resembles a death mask — a youth no longer young. In O’Reilly’s work there is an intimate, uneasy oscillation across the ages.

In much of the artist’s work death and life are piled on top of one another, like a spatial compression of a Godard film sequence, associated and disassociated. In “War Series #44, PFC Killed in Action, Germany, 1945, Age 18” (1992), the cutting serves to carve away anything extraneous. A Polaroid photomontage, the violence of collision echoes throughout the composite image and its constituent parts. Negative space, darks and lights, surround the naked body, the erect penis, the extended club, a dying or dead head turned away from us and falling down into the earth. A pushpin at the very bottom creates a violent pin-up portrait of an everyman now drained of life.

Likewise, in “Of Cavafy-Ring Bearer” (2008) a small child in a gender-ambiguous outfit is perched atop a cut-out of a chair resting against a medieval soldier’s helmet. Near the bottom, beneath the helmet, is a 20th-century photo of a dead soldier. A much smaller figure is turned away from us, his age indecipherable. This wreckage of masculinity and humanity is surrounded by the blackness of what I take to be unexposed Polaroid prints.

John O’Reilly, “Linnet” (2010), collage with found printed material (courtesy the artist)

For “With Chardin” (1981), “With Bonnard” (1985) and work directly referencing Genet, connections to past artists are more explicit, and require less of the viewer. While I am not as drawn to these images, “Marat with Eros” (1983) is tonic and iconic. In this work, a winged cherub (Caravaggio’s “Amor Vincit Omnia,” 1602) leers — sympathetically? victoriously? — at David’s renowned image of the revolutionary, dead in his bath. The merging is so simple, so graphically on-target, that any doubts I have about such blatant juxtapositions vanish. I can’t imagine a better image for Eros.

Along with Cavafy, Jean Genet, and Henry James to provoke his curious intellect and self-interrogation, O’Reilly has “Nijinksy,” created through a 2014 assemblage of found prints.

This work has a timely charge, as word has leaked out of Russia that the Bolshoi Ballet’s new work about Rudolph Nureyev, Vaslav Nijinsky’s heir, has been indefinitely postponed, quite possibly due to outlawed “gay content.” In O’Reilly’s work, a naked cherub is haloed by the cut-out negative space of the central figure, a red-cheeked paper doll of ambiguous gender, holding a toy soldier. Below is a small reclining figure. Arms, hands and feet surround all. As in so much of the artist’s work, the eroticism is radical; Eros is life, death, sex, childhood, aging, intake and outflow. Mobile and morbid yet also full of life, red-cheeked but also red-handed, everything moves toward dismemberment —dissociation and thus new association.

John O’Reilly, “Nijinsky” (2014), collage of found prints with board and tape, collection of the Artist (courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NY)

O’Reilly’s eroticism reflects desire, fear, the death incubated within life. Thus, “A French Birth,” in which a man appears to be giving birth while the head of Christ glances over, reminds me of a comment by musician Lucinda Williams: while her work is infused with religious references, she does not believe in God, at least as commonly conceived. It’s just everywhere, infused in life.

Decades into his practice, O’Reilly continues to experiment with process and materials. His most recent pieces are assembled primarily from found drawings in children’s coloring books or simple line drawings, and include little to no photographic material. They have a similar quality to his earlier works, of being torn and repositioned and juxtaposed, yet a sense of whimsy comes through. “I don’t tend to get stuck. I’m open to what comes along,” he told me. Where in some other artists’ collage-like work we are given a storm, chaos (which can be glorious), O’Reilly settles his fragments in a most exacting way, to create a multileveled landscape, turbulent but absorbing.

John O’Reilly, “Apparition” (2014), collage with found printed material (courtesy the artist)

On my initial visit to A Studio Odyssey, I questioned why the wall text for many of the images foregrounds the artist’s sexuality as something he’s “struggled” with. This is often the critical context imposed on work by LGBTQ artists whose sexuality is in any way overt. Framing sexuality as a struggle implies a problem. I recently attended an exhibition of Anselm Kiefer’s watercolors and artist books at Gagosian in Chelsea, and saw a room full of female nudes, yet Kiefer’s subject matter is not problematized or seen as a “struggle.”

On my second viewing of A Studio Odyssey, I found the wall commentary more appropriate and nuanced. Really, the work is so seductive, so inviting, so suffused with imagery, that commentary fades, as it should, into background. Gay artist, struggling soul, sure, but John O’Reilly is above all a relentless examiner of the depth of an image, and the deceptively flat plane of what we call a drawing or photograph.

John O’Reilly: A Studio Odyssey continues at the Worcester Art Museum (55 Salisbury Street, Worcester, Massachusetts) through August 13.

The post John O’Reilly’s Radical Photomontages appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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