Matt Blackwell and Patrick O'Hare

GHOST CATCHER

Having grown up in upstate New York, Patrick O'Hare and Matt Blackwell share the same background. Deeply historical and filled with memories of its past, this region, as well as New York City, forms the haunted heart and head at the core of the works in this exhibition.

Patrick O'Hare's photographs examine the peripheries: vacant lots, back streets, and the cross sections of our modern landscape where shored up walls hold back nature in what he calls "the silence between stations". Ceaseless wondering through this deserted and ghostly landscape, O'Hare explores places that most of us would avoid or ignore and that those in power deny.

Matt Blackwell paints memories of his own and other lives in western New York. Residencies over the last year in Utica and Saratoga Springs have refreshed Blackwell's personal and peripheral ghosts. In his paintings, Blackwell looks beyond the melancholy of broken down dreams to see and give voice to the resiliency and hum,or of the citizens of this space between memory and reality.

\Both artists point beyond their images. O'Hare's mundane Walmart rooftop merges with a rural landscape and sky to conjure up a vision of the last farmland and its inhabitants. Blackwell's broken down cars and worn out shanties evoke the lost dreams and hapless projects of their owners. Both artist recognize the darkness of life even as they might whistle or wink while walking past the graveyards of squandered lives, spoiled dreams and brutal enviorments. Rather than looking at their subjects with a voyeuristic or ironic eye, Blackwell and O'Hare lend compassion to the vanishing lifestyles, landscapes and hopes still lingering in the margins of today.