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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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