Clay Studio of Missoula artist crafts irreverent portraits
Matthew O'Reilly isn't afraid of being a little irreverent.
The Canadian artist, who's spent the past two years as a resident at the Clay Studio of Missoula, likes to make functional work and sculptures that lean into the grotesque and satirical. He wants to get a chuckle that helps the deeper material go down more smoothly.
In "Shed Light," his show that's just wrapped up his time at the nonprofit clay center, he sculpted statuesque male heads with everyday names like Max and Jim. Some of them are standalone busts, or vases, even lamps. He built a functional throne that's occupied by three cats with human heads.
"I deal with some heavier themes around suffering and human experience and hard emotions, and then I find humor, the grotesque in particular, is really disarming, and it allows people to have a conversation about something without raising all these guards we have," he said.
He sculpted busts of stern-looking men that make you think of the long history of masculine rulers and patriarchy. Some of them have goofy expressions. Some are mournful, scowling, surprised or elated.
"A lot of my work is self-portrait to an extent. Not like a literal one, but an exploration of an emotion or a state," he said. He's a constant sketcher, looking for new, complicated expressions the face can twist itself into.
He favors active surfaces that have earthy grit and color. Some faces appear literally splashed with color. One looks like he's drooling a rainbow. He'd begun turning some of them into lamps, as a way of taking a reverent form that's usually seen on a mantel and "knocking it down a peg," he said.
O'Reilly has been one of the studio's resident artists for the past two years — a common system in ceramics where artists get studio space and room to develop their work while teaching classes.
Shalene Valenzuela, the executive director, said that when he first arrived, he was working more in statutes and busts. He's begun exploring functional work — cups and vases with his signature style of faces — and then branching out into furniture and lamps.
The exit shows are a culmination of their time here, she said, but "it's an evolving process, they're still working out new ideas."
For this show, she said some were pretty wild.
Think cat figures with men's faces, positioned on a throne; or a tall lamp statue of a completely nude male figure with a scowling expression, titled "My Eyes Are Up Here," a way of "poking fun at the tradition of the male nude."
O'Reilly grew up in Ontario, earning his Master of Fine Art at Alberta University for the Arts. While some resident artists apply for residencies before graduate school, he arrived here in Missoula with experience and has now taught classes of various kinds for about 15 years.
He started working in figurative sculpture more than 10 years ago as an undergraduate.
Among his influences, he counts a particularly exuberant school from the 1970s called California Funk that he saw regularly in a Canadian gallery.
Western influences have seeped in a bit. Besides ceramics, he paints wildlife in a way that will seem familiar to Montanans, with a hot palette of exaggerated color.
As an example of humor, see one of his paintings in this show: a bison in a loose, pop-friendly rendering. The surprising part comes in the legs. This bison has five of them. He'd become interested in the idea of ginning up source imagery with AI programs, in part to have something to work off that wasn't someone else's photograph. When he wrote a prompt for two bison, one of the results had a leg too many. One of the tell-tale signs of a generative computer image of a human is the hands: They often get the number of fingers wrong. In the case of a quadruped, it's the legs.
The bison painting is paired with a mythical-seeming creature that has a bison's torso and legs, with a human's head, plus horns. He was influenced by ancient Sumerian and Egyptian tropes, something looking to the past to pair with the AI painting.
The surface of this creaturely sculpture is busy on purpose. O'Reilly was taught early on that large sculpture should have a minimalist surface to emphasize the form. With these pieces, he decided to think "maximalist," with an array of dots and drawn patterns applied with a squeeze bottle, like a Larry Pirnie painting.
This piece has some of the rough surface of a high temperature wood-firing, but it was actually fired at a relatively low heat in an electric kiln. He experimented with burying it deep in charcoal that slowly burned down over the course of the firing.
"Doing low-fire is a lot safer for large work," he said. Fewer cracks, or potential for a piece to get broken if another piece in the kiln blows up.
The show has sets of lamps and circular end tables, also with faces that inquisitively peer out of the sides. He's turned some of the busts into lamps, complete with shades. The fabric matches the pieces, with drips and washes of color thanks to Western Sensibility, a local textile company that produced them based on photos from the sculpture.
He was thinking about the "portrait of a person you can see from the collection of their possessions," he said. He also liked the way it takes a stately bust and turns it into a mundane, functional necessity.
In the future, he'd like to pursue more furniture and statues, potentially pitching for public art projects.
He's looking at options such as teaching jobs, from the college level to local public schools — he'd like to stay in the area if he can, after years of moving around for school and work.
He'd like to keep following "that spirit of intuition, it guided me here."
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