MATTHEW O'REILLY
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    • Procession of the Self (2022)
    • We In Me (2022)
    • Humbly Heroic (2022)
    • Piles of Barbarism (2022)
    • Navel Glazing (2021)
    • Unsettled Self (2020)
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Humbly Heroic (2022)
​at the Yule Family Gallery

My Thoughts
With this work I was trying to evoke the public square. With a public statuary visual vocabulary and levity, I asked questions about how we elect heroes and villains to occupy our sacred public spaces. While making this work I was reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), where I was fascinated by the hero's journey archetype and how it surfaces in our monuments. I thought, which of Campbell's seventeen stages do we typically depict in our narrative statuary, the call to adventure, the road of trails, or perhaps the magic flight? I embraced the idea of vulnerably and I blurred the lines with the grotesque.  This is nothing new of course, just a retelling of a tail as old as time, the imperfect hero, the redemptive villain.
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  • Home
  • Exhibitions
    • Procession of the Self (2022)
    • We In Me (2022)
    • Humbly Heroic (2022)
    • Piles of Barbarism (2022)
    • Navel Glazing (2021)
    • Unsettled Self (2020)
  • Artist Talks
  • Instagram
  • Press
  • CV/Bio/Contact
  • Education