Artist Captures Action At Da Silva Gallery

It’s a lone figure against an undefined background, but the details of the silhouette are crisp enough to make the figure an individual, a real person frozen in mid-action. And that action happens to be throwing a Molotov cocktail.

Artist Michael Quirk got the image by making stencils from photographs he found on the internet of protests in Venezuela. ​“These guys were rioters,” he said, referring to the Molotov cocktail-wielding figure as well as figures running with a flag in another piece next to it. The pieces capture the energy of the moment they were in, the movement and the danger, and they are part of ​“Darkness and Light,” an exhibit of Quirk’s work running now at Da Silva Gallery on Whalley Avenue in Westville through May 30.

But why make them silhouettes?

“I liked the simplicity of it,” Quirk said. In the past he had done oil paintings and sculpture, but for this series of images he found himself influenced by street art and comics — art that is particularly good at capturing action. His first pieces experimenting with the look of stenciled silhouettes were on paper, ​“an experimental thing,” he said. He ​“liked the look and the feel” of what he had made and switched over to acrylics to make most of the pieces in ​“Darkness and Light.”

“The backgrounds are basically abstract paintings,” Quirk explained. The ​“canvases” themselves are wood. ​“I liked that feel,” he said, ​“where you scrape and do what you want without damaging the ground. I could work it hard and sculpt with paint.”

Silhouettes have certain associations with them, born of a thousand books and movies. They’re mysterious, ominous, a little threatening. But as the title of the exhibit implies, Quirk sometimes puts these associations in a different context, for a more humorous effect.

“The dog is basically clip art,” Quirk said. In this domesticated backdrop, the dog because a kind of Everydog, belonging to an Everyman that himself is a bit of a throwback, to the archetype of a man working a white-collar job two generations ago.

Quirk even finds room for the vaguely ludicrous, as with an encounter between a woman and a famous movie monster. ​“She’s as tall as Godzilla so she’s not taking any crap from him,” Quirk said. ​“He’s just a guy in a rubber suit to her.” He added another layer by revealing that the silhouette was taken from a photograph of Lauren Bacall.

His explanations revealed a serious side, however, even to the more whimsical images. Another silhouette depicted a figure in armor riding a house, pageant flags unfurling behind it. That, Quirk said, was taken from an image of Joan of Arc.

“I had Joan of Arc facing down Trump” in a different piece, Quirk said, ​“but it was on paper and I couldn’t get it framed up in time.” To Quirk, the piece was about ​“women empowering themselves against tyranny.”

The same kind of logic applied to a stencil of an animal standing on two legs that appeared in multiple images. The source for that was a photograph of a bear lying on the ground after it had been brought down by tranquilizers. ​“I woke him up,” Quirk said, by making him upright again.

And as the images of protestors would suggest, Quirk doesn’t shy away from seriousness either. The silhouettes of the police officer and the person with their hands in the air in Hands Up, Don’t Shoot remain individuals, but are also stand-ins for the incidents of police shootings that seem to keep happening again and again.

And while Quirk explained that the source image for the silhouette in Falling is actually a skateboarder failing to execute a stunt — that is, a backstory not nearly as serious as it could be — the way the image is rendered adds weight to the topic. Maybe the person has only fallen over, and the ground isn’t far away. In circuses the world over, clownish pratfalls are still funny. But maybe the person started their fall from a much greater height, and the ground is still far away. The silhouette and abstraction make both things possible. We laugh, and we worry at the same time.