Independent curator Trevor Fairbrother has put together “John O’Reilly, Marsden Hartley: Two Kindred Spirits,’’ a moving and provocative exhibit at Howard Yezerski Gallery, that highlights O’Reilly’s Dogtown series and other photomontages alongside spare, fevered drawings by Hartley, on loan from the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine.
The boulders play a big part in the works of both artists. Hartley’s pen-and-ink drawing depicting Dogtown, “Untitled. Subject: Rock, Walls, Twisted Trees, Blueberry Bushes,’’ sets the big rocks undulating in the middle of a scene buzzing with the tangled lines of foliage and the speckles of grass and berries.
O’Reilly, who breathtakingly shuffles shreds of art-historical imagery and personal narrative, here weaves his own photos of boulders with images of sculptural figures, such as a Michelangelo terra cotta in “Dogtown Hartley Series 1/24/09.’’ The figure is not perfectly clear, but you sense a shoulder, a haunch, as man struggles to emerge from stone.
In the forefront of O’Reilly’s virtuosically assembled “Dogtown Hartley Series, 10/29/09,’’ a man - whose legs and feet, clad in ballet slippers, might be from an old photo of Nijinsky, a regular player in this artist’s work - lies writhing before a jagged rock face. Above, ancient classical columns stand, fall, and meld seamlessly with the rock; a house topples into a William Morris textile design. A snapshot in a bottom corner captures young men on a dock, two of them shirtless - like the men in many of Hartley’s drawings.
That artist’s pieta, “Badly Bruised - Who Is He?’’ shows a small legion of square-shouldered, shirtless men cradling a nearly naked figure. This hangs beside O’Reilly’s own “Pieta’’ from 1995, in which the artist holds a naked Christ.
