John O’Reilly is known for the highly personal photo-collages and montages that he has been making over many decades. O'Reilly's work was featured in the Whitney Biennial in 1995, and was the subject of a retrospective at the Addison Museum of American Art in 2002. In creating his intricate images, O'Reilly uses old photographs purchased at flea markets (or received as gifts), reproductions torn out of books, as well as his own photographic imagery. Finding inspiration in the assemblage boxes of Joseph Cornell, he fashions dream-like fantasies spun from ideas related to his own artistic creativity, his sexuality, and a passion for literature and art history. In this work, O’Reilly has taken the celebrated volume of poems by Alfred Edward Housman, "A Shropshire Lad", and supplemented it with his own additional photomontage illustrations that tie the past to the present. Frequently, O’Reilly’s works have an autobiographical aspect, and the several appearances of young men in his illustrations can be interpreted to be stand-ins for both the Shropshire lad as well as himself.

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