Elizabeth O’Reilly Exhibition
George Billis Gallery
This event has ended.
Echoing her two-decade long preoccupation with depictions of the Gowanus canal comes a series of paintings of a 50’s motel on the North Fork of Long Island. O’Reilly paints white cabins lit by sunlight, dappled with the shadows of trees and their leaves, dotted with white plastic chaises longues, and red picnic tables and benches, frozen in time. Echoing the motel is a white cabin in the woods of Maine whose windows mirrors back a landscape that deters the viewer from looking in. Implicit in all of O’Reilly’s paintings is a feeling of places caught half-way between use and abandonment. Within the dominance of the manmade, nature perpetually waits, asserting itself in a wild burst of weeds and trees, or in the healing gestures of water. There is the poetic and sometimes poignant loneliness of a setting that has felt the vigor of industry in past times and has now softened with the bits of green that is the hand of the natural world, beginning to reclaim.
In these paintings there is the shock of unexpectedly vibrant color from man-made sources which both complement and clash against certain colors of the natural world; very often against the cooler colors of water, the sky, or the changing pattern of light across a white cabin; these things lend a lively
and quirky beauty to what might otherwise be more ordinary.
Media
Schedule
from October 13, 2015 to November 14, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-10-15 from 18:00 to 20:00