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CATHERINE MCCARTHY
Mother Tongue
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Boston-based artist Catherine McCarthy shows new paintings dealing
with
man's struggle for dominance over nature and other cultures, history
and
how we learn it, and the search for "home." Her paintings
bring together a
diverse array of imagery and styles, taken from such sources as
mid-20th
century children's textbooks, the 19th century seascape paintings
of Martin
Johnson Heade, Japanese wood block prints, nautical manuals, history
books,
and contemporary fashion magazines.
Mother tongue is one's native language, or a language from which
another
language derives. In this body of work the pictorial rather than
the written
language takes precedence. The paintings combine imagery that
is ancient
and contemporary, from Eastern, Western, and Native American sources.
Tight, technical sketches share space with loose, childlike drawings.
Geishas
travel in boats, early explorers examine the sky to understand
the solar
system and our place in the cosmos. Everything seems to coalesce
into a
search for the common ground, the original source, the universal
home.
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Nagasaki Moon's Modest Journey, 2002
oil and acrylic on canvas, 53" x 35"
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JOHN O'REILLY
The Nijinsky Series
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John O'Reilly has been making photo-montages for over 30 years from
his
home in Worcester, Massachusetts. Using a Polaroid camera, he photo-
graphs scenes set up in his studio and his own body parts. He also
rephoto-
graphs images from magazines, history books, and other sources.
He then
combines these various images into collages in which figures morph
into each
other amidst fragmented backgrounds.
"The Nijinsky Series" examines the genius and madness
of the famous early
20th century dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky. Nijinsky combined masculinity
and andro-
gyny, athleticism and effeminacy in a way that had never been seen
on stage.
His choreography dealt in angles and broken lines as well as broken
phrases.
His ability to connect with his primal, animal nature, to lose himself
in the dance,
and ultimately, his demise into schizophrenia, are explored in this
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Cardinal 2/5/02, 2002
unique Polaroid collage, 9-3/4" x 8-1/4"
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MARC LAFIA
Possibilities of a Beautiful Love
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Marc Lafia is the creator of the pioneering and award-winning
internet art
site ArtandCulture and of other interactive art projects like
Memex Engine.
For this exhibition, he explores his interest in film as a series
of frames, with
each frame being the particular of an instant. "An instant
when taken from a
film becomes something else," says Lafia. He uses the 1962
Michelangelo
Antonioni film "Eclipse" as source material. Isolating
several frames from the
film, he has altered, decelerated, and projected them on separate
walls.
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Possibilities of a Beautiful Love,
2002, 2 DVD projections, installation view
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