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| At first appearance,
Thom O’Connor’s quiet and subtly nuance relief prints seem to belong to the tradition
of monochromatic abstraction; in fact their compositions recall nothing so much
as the constructivist tradition of solitary lines stretching across stark planes
of single colors. The overall title of his current series, however, is The Road
North, which seems to indicate that he is interested in at least the possibility
of representation. As our eye follows the movement of the white line, the introduction
of a tributary branching off in a different direction suggests distance, direction
and even topography. Once we have accustomed ourselves to seeing O’Connor’s work
as residing midway between the openness of abstraction and the specificity of
mapping, we also begin to explore the idea that many of our images of ‘reality’
are in turn based on the kinds of geometrical traditions that began the century,
and that the separations between abstraction and representation are no longer
as clear-cut as they seemed. (excerpt from Dan Cameron's catalog essay, click to see full text) |
