Tony Gentry | Mad Swirl

Mad Swirl welcomes to the visual arts stage, Virginia-based writer and photographer, Tony Gentry. The thing that spoke most loudly to us from Gentry’s work is the otherwise everyday nature of that which seems to beckon to him. There is something ironic to some of his photographs – a bride walking down a dirty city-street with her groom in tow or a reference to magic on a dingy, graffiti-covered surface. This is the kind of mundane madness that we’re talking about – the kind that beckons to Tony and beckons to us, too, when we’re looking for it. There is art and magic and madness surrounding us all. We’re just thankful that Tony knows exactly how to capture it. ~ Madelyn Olson

In my country
we only dressed for church
and let our privates dangle
otherwise. We studied
the webs of spiders, the
flight of swallows, the
whims of the wind.

We never learned much.
How to catch a fish.
How to dip in dance.
How to wait out the weather.

Back there we thought
that was enough. We
honored dogs, fed them first,
sprawled in the sun and tried
to howl in greeting.

We had some rules. People
brought things they’d found
to church and took other
things home. Sometimes
just a smooth rock or a flower
or a feather.

It was like touch chess here.
If you picked it up you had to
keep it and if you brought
it back the next week
people shook their heads.

But nobody would bite you,
not for that. I left before
I learned how we reproduced.
Maybe the same as here, dipping
and howling. I’m trying to
figure it out. What’s
different, what’s the same.

I’d go back. It doesn’t seem
right to wear jeans all day
scrunched on a sofa out of the sun.
I miss my dog. But I’ll
get over it. It’s part of the game.
I gave this girl a pebble
and she smiled.