John O’Reilly
Born 1930, Orange, NJ, lives and works in Worcester, MA
A Field of View, 1969, paper montage and casein, Museum Purchase, 1997.70
Although known today primarily as a photographer, in the late 1960s John O'Reilly experimented with collage, combining images cut from magazines and books with a painted surface. In A Field of View, the vast black space of casein paint becomes a dominating force against which scattered celestial formations and floating, acrobatic figures of naked males are suspended. These have been culled from magazines and reproductions of Eadweard Muybridge's photographic studies of the human body in motion. A Field of View was made without a camera. In later bodies of work when O'Reilly began to use the camera, he combined his self-portrait with photographic reproductions from history and art history, effectively merging the self into art.
