Today Les and I took in a few gallery shows, the entire experience contained by different relations to space. The first show featured the photos of John O’Reilly, my favorite artist. John is in his mid 70’s, and his last 2 projects have focused much more acutely on the passage of time, meticulous little surreal paste-ups of black and white polaroid images of his crumbling world and studio, flecked here and there with allusions to youth and music, the visual space vibrating between personal and public past and present. He shared the gallery with an Australian artist, Timothy Horn, who created what seemed like baroque earrings and baubles, but enlarged to extreme proportions, vulgar and delicious. We then saw the photographs of Candida Höfer, large-scale photos of grand interior public spaces around the world, devoid of people but filled with amazing detail. The spaces were all quite gaudy and antique, but with slight references to the occupation of a contemporary presence and sensibility.
Happily or not, my love life seems on an even keel, and the absence of any heart-wrenching obsession or drama has me wondering about what to work on next. I’ve asked Dean to make himself busy on Friday so that I could have the day to myself to work in the studio on some ideas for my next project. I’ve never made art during such a lull in my soap opera–I’ll have to make something about that.
Philip came over last night for Chicken Coco-tore and then we zipped up the hill to join Redbackfur at BC’s for Carol Reed’s extraordinary Odd Man Out. James Mason plays an IRA leader who falls off the getaway car while speeding away from a robbery. Shot in the shoulder, and slowly dying, he wanders around town, looking for a place to hide and for someone to take him in, and thus wanders through every strata of republican or loyalist sentiment. At one point in Mason’s plight, a fey painter obsessed with capturing the darkness of the human soul takes him back to his flat to paint him. It’s a moving film, compassionate without being moralistic, with subtle performances and a brilliant script.
FLASH: Reese and I put up a new page on Fluffy and Ruffy last Friday…
Transform-a-Character!
(Reese did all the animation himself!)