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Piece of work; By
Molly Beth Brenner in |
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I'm strolling through D. Berman Gallery, drinking in the fabulously imaginative, chunkily painted creaturescapes of Robert Jessup. Presently I turn a corner and
am faced with a string of large, vividly hued paintings resembling
Polaroid moments caught in oils. These are the works of Katy O'Connor.
Scanning the wall, my eyes fall on Katherine, and it's there that
my fascination heightens, O'Connor's paintings are scenic, but not
in the sense of the word usually used to describe art. They're not
beautiful tree-and-mountain scenes; they're theatrical scenes, usually
involving two people. It's clear that her subjects are in the midst
of an exchange, be it verbal, physical, or 'less clearly specified.
And though her scenes do not generally appear emotionally heated,
an undertow of vague ' tension laces each one. Katherine stands out
in O'Connor's works at D. Berman. It is the only piece in her portion
of the show that features a single person instead of the artist's
usual two and the subject has her back to the viewer; she s crouched
down, bending over her purse. But when asked at the gallery talk why
Katherine has only one subject, the artist suggested that the purse
is actually the second character in this scene. In Katherine, the
woman's rela-tionship to the purse is obscured (is she retrieving
a piece of gum or a gun?), making the moment after this picture takes
place hard to imagine. It is this sense of multiplying possibilities,
of questions left unanswered, that makes O'Connor's Katherine so intriguing.
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