When the Worcester-based artist John O’Reilly died in 2021, he left behind hundreds of books that he had used to create decades of collages. Multiple museums had taken his finished work to be acquisitioned into their collections, but John’s scraps and cut up secondhand books still felt alive with potential, in need of someone to help them complete their purpose.  Through luck and a perfect confluence of events, I was able to take home a large portion of John’s leftovers to make new work with them in a project called Dear John.

Though we didn’t formally know each other, I have long been inspired by John’s work, which is so much about seeing himself and queerness in his own fractured retelling of art history.  John never really considered himself a photographer and I too am conflicted about the distinction.  And yet I am certain of collage and photography’s tangled relationship, one that weaves through John’s and my own work, connecting us to one another.

Integrating his clippings and pages from his books with items of my own, I made new analogue collages and photographs from collage-like constructions.  It felt important to build the work with my hands, to retrace John’s steps of sorting, cutting, and pasting.  I wanted to try on his perspective, not simply to mimic his work, but to engage with John’s visual language and merge that with my own, allowing me to enter his world of the past while simultaneously questioning him in the present.  These new images highlight where we overlap and diverge: our status as outsiders of various sorts, our histories with Catholicism, our relationships with fantasy, art history, and the male body.   They also allow me to wander through key moments in photography’s history, revisiting them from a queer and interdisciplinary perspective.