The paintings in The Ecstasy of Discipline appear to be snapshots of pure idleness, torpid messengers at a time in which precarity has become the yield of productivity. On second glance, however, the peasants appear to be on the cusp of action, as if poised to collectively experience an ethos, or a spectral force - the ‘spirit’ of the works’ titles. A ‘will to work’, whereby painting peasants now, reveals, like an apparition, signs of puritanical tyrannical economy, caught between blank collective austerity and fetishized individualism.

"I am but God’s finger..."

The paintings are based on digital photographs taken by the artist at a pilgrim settler village in Massachusetts where actors reenact the harsh and holy realities of puritan self-determination. By taking photographs of the reenactors mid-expression, the artist has rendered the subjects in spiritual states ranging from dumbfounded to lackadaisical, as in The Spirit of Austerity, that belie the abject toiling of their character-ancestors.

The vessels in the painting The Spirit of Lack speak volumes, appearing both larger than life, and inadequate to contain the emptiness that fills them. They are expressive, in the same way that the figures in The Spirit of Discipline are expressive, concealing more than they show and appearing to be both purposeful and useless, oozing potentiality. The jugs and pots experience the same devotion to their calling as their users, and all are hell bent on proving their worth in God’s eyes.

The works have the effect of ‘peopling’ the space, suggesting a congre- gation, or a mob. Painting and sculpture embracing, or acting out, their differences. The combination of steel and drywall forced together with nuts-and-bolts smacks of punishing materialism, evoking restraint as much as support. Here, drywall, weak in all the wrong places and ubiquitous in modern housing, is transformed into an immaculate ground into which oil paint seeps, producing an oily aura, which could as likely be haunted as holy. The unpainted areas add to the deftly painted gures, and their pos- sessions, a strange austerity, a kind of naked void where anything might materialize.

Text by Aislinn McNamara