Michael O'Rourke
Trees, Tide Pools, Cities, Nebulae

Uma Gallery
New York, NY
Oct. 4 - 28, 2006

All of the pieces in this exhibit combine hand-drawn drawings with photographs of urban life, nature, and outer space in an attempt to capture the richness and variety of our human lives and, at the same time, our relationship to the rest of existence -- trees, rocks, nebulae, bumblebees. The imagery deals with a variety of feelings and ideas -- the horror of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade towers, the tranquility of families socializing in a park, the bustle of people rushing about to work, children at play, old people asleep. And intermixed with these, flowers, insects, stars, oceans.

In his book, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, the writer John Steinbeck spoke eloquently of some of what I have been after in this imagery:

... all life is relational to the point where an Einsteinian relativity seems to emerge. And then not only the meaning but the feeling about species grows misty. One merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. And the units nestle into the whole and are inseparable from it. Then one can come back to the microscope and the tide pool and the aquarium. But the little animals are found to be changed, no longer set apart and alone. And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known as unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things -- plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.

In each composition, all the elements, human and otherwise, relate to one another not only by their inclusion within the composition, but also by virtue of shared colors, patterns and linear elements. The white space that runs through and around the compositions suggests an endlessness, while the rectangles of the compostions echo the rectangles of our current visual culture -- video screens, film screens, the floating windows of our computer screens. The inclusion and merging of different media -- photography, drawing, video-screen captures, digital imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope -- break down the boundaries between those "media", making them ultimately indistinguishable from one another, in the same way that elements of the natural world, including us, can be viewed as indistuishable.

The artwork in this exhibit was produced over a six-year period, from 2000 to 2006. All were composed digitally and are printed digitally on archival Hahnemuhle paper with archival Epson Ultrachrome K3 inks. Each is an edition of 30 signed prints.