Mickey Cartin, who owns the private collection that has been the source of recent exhibitions at Ars Libri, said in an interview that the Boston-based Laffoley found the canvas at the bottom of a stack of paintings in his studio. For this show, the artist has written text that vividly puts the sweetly buttoned-down figure in context:
“I went to the Woodstock Festival looking like my image in this self-portrait trying to retrieve 18 of my paintings that I believed had been ‘stolen,’ ’’ he writes. “That is probably why I was accused of being a F.B.I. Agent trying to set up a ‘sting’ operation at the festival about ‘drugs.’ ’’ (You can read the full text at www.cartincollection.com/currently.html).
The painting and the story behind it suggest that Laffoley has been out of the mainstream from early on. Although he has a devoted following, he is still an outsider. The self-portrait fascinates as a humble, mildly goofy picture of an artist who has generated bright, deeply complex, and hopeful images of the future - maps toward salvation.
A vast landscape
On her website www.unfinishedbridge.blogspot.com, artist Louisa Conrad quotes the poet Greta Wrolstad: “Each/map leaves every valid detail/out, and those who would be the great/cartographers would never draw/a line.’’
Conrad does draw lines, but she’s an intriguing cartographer. In her spare show at anthony greaney, she uses a variety of media to chart and evoke the Mackenzie Delta, an area in the Canadian arctic that oil and gas companies have been exploring for decades.
The show’s centerpieces are two moody, large-scale color photos, shot with film during a boat ride near the Kendall Island Bird Sanctuary and the proposed site of a gas-conditioning facility. These summon the quiet and scope of the environment.
