You can never go home again. All the things you remember have changed, all the people have grown older, all the places have been replaced, and memories begin to fade at the edges. However, those memories still have the power to color people’s present-day actions and thoughts; they are things that never go away and remain with us.
Matt Blackwell and Patrick O’Hare went home. “Ghostcatcher” is what they found.
“We’re all haunted by our experiences. You either welcome it back in and try to understand it, or you bury it. I deal with it by painting,” Blackwell said to me while we sat among his work.
“I tried to capture the echoes of a certain time in my photographs,” O’Hare told me. “I’m capturing a fleeting moment and a sense of mystery all together. I want to show this world as well as ‘another world’; to find the layers and capture the edges among them.”
“Ghostcatcher” is not only what they found, but also what they remember. It is a joint show that focuses on those fleeting moments. Haunting and fresh-breathed at the same time, the show is about exorcising demons and capturing memories at the same time.
The exhibit focuses on upstate New York, a region hard hit by economic woes for the last 20 years; an area depressed and in a process of decomposition. Blackwell remembers going to visit his boyhood area a few years back and being struck by how far the region had sunk. “There’s a lot of drinking go on now [to deal with the decline] and a lot of whistling-in-the-graveyard humor.”
His paintings capture that feeling by using everyday American icons. A multi-colored car sitting in a quiet evening snow, “Worry Later” screams of patience and silence and the continuing movement of life towards an end. Blackwell ran across the car huddled in the woods and it struck him that this battered old car belonged there – it seemed to fit perfectly in the surrounding nature.
A yellow El Camino was parked at the bottom of a hill, slowly settling into the muddy ground. “Humidity Built the Snowman” takes a piece of Americana that was loved by someone at some time, and that now lies halfway in the ground - a metaphor for the region, for the time he grew up in, for life itself. Sugar plum dreams dance down onto the car among snowflakes, memories of sweet nothings and a good life that has all but evaporated now.
O’Hare’s photographs tackle the landscape and what he refers to as portals or edges - the meeting of two worlds and the tension that exists between them. He believes landscapes give the viewer a sense of place while also including an inherent mystery - the imprints left behind.
“Parking Lot” is an old mobile home in a tattered and ripped tarp next to a weathered and beaten-down home. The scene is stark and bleak (a quality O’Hare sees often in his work) but there is a sense of redemption and hope as the harsh sun breaks over the roof and the ripped tarp reveals a door into the mobile home. Perhaps sanctuary still exists.
“Wal-Mart” at first appears to be a snowy barren tundra with a broad sky overhead. It turns out to be the rooftop of a strip mall Wal-Mart, with skylights poking through to allow the sun in and dozens of air conditioners to cool the store. The picture is cold and grey, like metal on your tongue, and the sky in the photo dominates over this temporary structure of man.
“Flood Wall” is perhaps one of my favorites, depicting a cool white concrete wall covered with ivy in the shape of angel wings, seemingly straining to lift the structure into the dark, menacing sky overhead. Bleak, yes. Hopeful and desiring, that too.
The process of art in the end is one of self-discovery, both for the audience and for the artist. O’Hare told me “every picture is a self-portrait.” The two artists in this show are examining what was left behind in their native region, what was left behind in them, and what they, in the end, want to leave.