Occupied Territory #4 - Wolf
Artist/Culture
John O'Reilly
(American, 1930–2021)
Date1995
MediumPolaroid photomontage
Dimensions10.6 x 13 cm (4 3/16 x 5 1/8 in.)
ClassificationsPhotographs
Credit LineThomas Hovey Gage Fund
Terms
Object number1998.167
Label TextFor more than forty years, Worcester resident John O’Reilly has pieced together fragments of photographic reproductions resulting in meticulous hybrids of place, time, and corporeal identity. As one critic wrote of these photomontages, “O’Reilly transformed photographic truth into fiction and photographic fiction into truth.” For this image, from the series Occupied Territories (whose individual titles are names taken from a photographic album of German World War II soldiers that the artist found), O’Reilly reconfigured fragments of nude males and helmeted combatants into a sensual warrior who “occupies” the sylvan setting of a painting of a female nude by the French artist Camille Corot. The image is a harmony of contradictions – war and peacetime, male and female, real and ideal, German and French. As O’Reilly explains, a “fictional nude German soldier displaces a nude French woman. The photographic reality of the German soldiers trespasses the painted idylls of Corot…All that remains of the young French reclining nude is her shadow.”ProvenanceFletcher/Priest Gallery, 5 Pratt St., Worcester, MA 01609On View
Not on view
