Patrick Pound & Lillian O'Neil in Conversation with Adam Jasper – Monday May 6th 2013 – PSM Lecture Series

  Last week’s lecture was the standout so far. Patrick Pound and Lillian O’Neil in conversation with Adam Jasper, what more could you ask for? Patrick started things off, delivering an eloquent lecture, his words carefully selected and pieced together in a most poetic fashion. I was fighting an internal struggle whether to madly jot down notes or just sit back and digest his witty articulations. His wit won out and I am so glad it did. I am always appreciative when artists share personal stories. Hearing about Pounds’ family and the way they each – one by one – fell in love with photography was endearing. He described to us how as a boy, shooting from the car provided him with a platform from which to view the world without participating in it. And if I weren’t smitten enough with his lovely candor, he mentioned William Eggleston, a personal favorite of mine, and how he’d mastered the “rightly wrong look of the amateur snap”.

(Pound (detail) 2007-2010)

 Lillian O’Neil seemed hesitant to speak following Patrick, she said shyly to Adam something along the lines of “I thought we were just having a casual chat”. I liked her immediately. Lillian currently creates large collages from images found in vintage books she scours cities for. She describes her works as personal maps and shared with us how she started to make these collages in the throes of falling properly in love for the first time. An admitted rom-com junkie, Lillian had realized these movies had destroyed love for her, so she went gone cold turkey off the romantic garbage and began to work toward understanding love by researching in a scientific way. I personally found her honesty and vulnerability charismatic, particularly as I had recently attempted to understand my own heartbreak through a collage project (that failed in the artistic sense and barely passed in the marking sense) and understood exactly what she meant when she spoke of making a “smooth surface out of a broken mass of things”, and the symmetrical nature of her works reflecting love, two people “trying hard to combine but they can’t”.

(O’Neil 2013)

Adam, as only Adam could, discussed the similarities between the two artists visually different styles in an eye-opening way that explained why they feature alongside one another in his exhibition Living in the Ruins of the 20th Century, (currently showing at the DAB Gallery). He also, as only Adam does, knew exactly when our brains were at capacity for new information, and invited us to tour the gallery with a cold beer in hand. I wish every lecture were this interesting, honest, inspiring and amusing, and I wish every lecture ended with beer.

Image References:

Pound, 2007-2010, Portrait of the Wind (detail), StillsGallery.com, viewed Monday May 13th 2013,

http://ocula.com/art-galleries/stills-gallery/artworks/portrait-of-the-wind-(detail)/ 

O’Neil, 2013, Total Romance, thecommercialgallery.com, viewed Monday May 13th 2013,