Poems From the Mountains Exhibit to Open at Harford Community College

From Harford Community College:

Poems From the Mountains, an exhibition of works by Bart O’Reilly, will be on display in the Chesapeake Gallery in the Student Center located on the Harford Community College campus from March 3 to April 2. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 9, from 5:30 to 7 PM in the Chesapeake Gallery.

Bart O’Reilly received his BFA degree in painting from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland in 2000. He later moved to the United States and attended MICA in 2012 to earn his MFA degree. Since 2013, O’Reilly has been credit adjunct faculty teaching painting at Harford Community College. He also instructs art at The Hussman Institute at UMBC and Towson University.

O’Reilly states, “My work is concerned with light, shadow, color, material and perception. Using drawing, painting, video and poetry, I ask questions like, what do we see when we pay attention? And how can color, light and shadow affect our perception of form, space and material? I explore color as a subject in itself. There is also an interest in the associations that can arise from the application of sparse and reductive painterly techniques.

It seems natural to seek to understand the gestalt or the whole of our experience with the world. How do we occupy space? How accurate are our perceptions compared with the true nature of reality? Such a desire however limits and frustrates us. As finite creatures our faculties of perception grow, develop, and deteriorate over time. Even at our sharpest we are influenced by countless factors relating to environment, culture and our place in history. A claim to truly know or understand seems at best arrogant and at worst extremely dangerous. I try to expose the ever-shifting relationship between what we perceive and what we claim to know.”

The Chesapeake Gallery is open Monday to Thursday, from 8:30 AM to 7 PM and Friday, from 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM.