Urbanite Article
Recycle, Repurpose, Re-Contextualize
Mixed media artist Bart O'Reilly wants his work to slow people down.
by Cara Ober“Baltimore has had a huge affect on me as an artist,” says Irish-born transplant Bart O'Reilly. “The impulse to collect from the streets and see drawing as a thing that may exist within an urban environment may never have happened if I had stayed in Dublin. There is a lot of blight and urban decay here which, despite its socially negative consequences, gives the city a sense of history and in my opinion has a poetic beauty to it.”
“I am very much aware that the city has problems that need to be fixed,” O’Reilly says. “But my practice of re-contextualizing discarded materials, and asking people to assess them aesthetically, encourages a sense of respect for our history. I want people to slow down, to assess the present in relation to the past. Baltimore, the east coast of the USA, and the Western world, in general, is far too caught up in the instant, in the moment. We have lost our sense of where we are in relation to the past. I think it is time to look at what we are leaving behind us as a culture and see if we can learn from it.”
O'Reilly's story is unique among Baltimore artists. He ended up in Baltimore by chance. “As a young student, I and a group of friends decided to travel to the United States on summer work visas. We ended up in Ocean City, Maryland, and that is where I met my wife, Meaghan. She lived in Ireland for a year or so when we were both just out of college and we eventually made the decision in 2003 to move back to Baltimore, where she could pursue her career as an art teacher. Meaghan is from Bel Air so we like it here because we are close to her family. We have two young boys now, Eoin [4 years old; pronounced “Owen”) and Ronan [6 months old]. I have been lucky enough to find a steady job teaching adults with disabilities and have also managed to show my work quite a lot in the greater Baltimore-D.C. area and up north as far as Philadelphia. I am taking part in (e)merge art fair in September in Washington, D.C., where I will be represented by Solas Nua, a nonprofit devoted to promoting contemporary Irish arts in the United States.”
O'Reilly currently lives in White Marsh. His studio is at Load of Fun in Baltimore
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