James Gallagher
August 20th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
James Gallagher works solely in collage.
His is a hybrid of styles, where influences can be seen but he still manages to maintain his own style and pattern. The age of Hannah Hock can be seen in his selected images, which come from vintage skin mags, old stationary, National Geographics, finance charts, etc. One can see the sense of negation that is so central to Baldessari’s work, and the playful cropping with paint that Franz West so brilliantly achieves in his gouache / magazine page works.
Gallagher uses vintage porn imagery quite a lot in his work, and I have chosen to focus on other aspects of his work here. Not because I am a prude, or am opposed to re-purposing porn, but because his other series have a little more going on in them, they work on several more levels. The Finance Series (top two images) and the Domestic Series (bottom two) are more interesting to me: the use of design furniture, or facts and figures, are denied their purpose and real look but maintain their identity, and they interact with the more decorative elements in a way that the nude works don’t, because the focus of that series is on the nude images themselves.
In this age of DIY rugged construction and Mad Men mid-century nostalgia, these works sum up the current aesthetics quite well.
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All images are copyright James Gallagher, and are borrowed from his website.
