Mary McCleary: After Paradise

After Paradise was a one-preson show at Moody Gallery, Houston, which opened June 3, 2006. Square Halo Books is proud to have published the catalog for this show. In addition to stunning, full color reproductions of McCleary's recent work, there are essays by Harold Fickett and Clint Willour discussing the history and impact of her work.

We recommend ordering this title through Hearts and Minds.

"[Mary McCleary] is ultimately concerned with the ongoing theme in literature of our fall from grace and our flight from God and of His constant pursuit of us. As the model for the The Good Samaritan (1995), I am hopeful that she is right. As a curator I am confidant that He has guided Mary into making art that can assist him in his mission in a most amazing and unique way." —Clint Willour

" After Paradise we are barred from storming the Gates of Eden through utopian fantasies and every merely human imagining, including the artist’s own. We’ve fallen a long way since Eden, and, to judge by McCleary’s 9.81 Meters Per Second Per Second, our free-fall continues to accelerate. Her art evokes the horror we are so adapt at concocting and longs for the blessedness of a new earth characterized by love, justice, and peace—by God’s redemption. Her work is an instance of how that process has already begun.” —Harold Fickett

"Mary McCleary’s (Image #23) new book of reproductions, After Paradise, is a treat for the eyes. Though well-versed in many forms, her coup de grace is mixed media, and the delight of her recent narrative portraits is in the details—those bits of sticks, beads, googly eyes, trinkets, and ragboard that create living forms so rich in nuance and expression, you have to blink to realize you are beholding not a painting, but an assembly of objects painstakingly arranged into a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. The reproductions in this book are of canvasses several feet square in real life, and they jump off the page in texture and color. Figures of friends, family, animals, plants and an assortment of other objects are caught in strange and astonishing postures. The scenes are often disconcerting, partnered with titles that unhinge our initial assumptions about them. An idyllic pastoral of well-bred dogs (and a lion), robust with life, takes on a chill under the title Nazi Pets. Another piece, 9.81 Meters per Second per Second, an eerie free-fall of people in tennis shorts, pajamas, suits, and dresses, all adrift in flowers, demonstrates the rate of acceleration due to the earth’s gravitational pull, as well as a more thoroughgoing human fall. The threat of those rifts between meaning are punctuated by emblems of hope—a mourning dove in a thicket of thorns; a woman’s mouth tilted up to receive a sparrow’s normally repulsive offering to its young; the smiley face attending a ship tossed but not submerged in a storm. McCleary puts the question to us: who and where are we after paradise? Harold Fickett posits an answer in his stirring introduction: “McCleary’s method forces the viewer to take into account the mystery of the incidental becoming significant and even transcendent” just as “the creative word was translated into mere flesh.” We are inescapably ourselves, startled by the hard facts of the composition of the world and us in it, but somehow saved in taking that second look." —IMAGE