My past work has dealt with ideas of representing the world of “things” in vails of abstractions as a means of de-linking form from time. Through this, my hope was to re-present the exuberant energy of life and the nature of consciousness that confronts it. My recent work builds on this idea and in this particular set of work for the Prizm Art Fair, I have referenced Ralph Ellison’s novel the Invisible Man. Here I couple the abstraction of visible things with the concept of social invisibility faced by Ellison’s character. In the novel, his character speaks these words of the people that he encounters “When they approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me”.
Aramis O’Reilly
United States