ETHAN RYMAN SERIES: STILL LIVES AND DIORAMAS
NOVEMBER 27, 2021 - JANUARY 30, 2022
OPENING RECEPTION: NOV 27, 4 - 8P HOURS: THURS - SUN, 12 - 6P
Proof of vaccination and masks are required.
Art Cake is pleased to present Series: Still Lives and Dioramas, a solo exhibition featuring new works by Ethan Ryman.
ETHAN RYMAN ARTIST STATEMENT
IMAGES THINGS FRAMES SHADOWS
Images:
With regard to the images in my work it is irrelevant to me what something is or where it is or what is in front or behind. It is only important how it looks as art. The images are not collage or paintings or composites but photographic scenes from real-life 'still lifes' – arrangements, sculptural assemblages, similar to what I compose in the streets, using the spatial combinations of the architecture and infrastructure I (we) pass by every day. For years I have been collecting these “convergences,” which can be seen in some of my earlier work and on my ongoing Instagram piece - @titan_of_leisure.
Things:
Things reside on shelves and are sometimes hinged and separate from the wall. Things are placed, can be manipulated. Once a scene of complex dimensionality is imagined flat and made flat with a camera, it must be brought back into dimensional space as a print or a screen or …. something. What happens between the camera’s imagined flat scene and the actual printed flat object on the wall affect how the image is understood. To my obsessive brain there is a difference between a sticker that almost becomes part of the wall and a wall painting which does become part of the wall. We tend to see an image on a wall or a page as a window, as something imagined, separate from the world. But when you are looking through a pile of photographs, even though you are looking at images, you are holding objects in the world and the images are also seen as objects. I have always shown my flattened scenes as objects to make this difference conspicuous. Many of my previous works land somewhere on the image side of the image/object spectrum. But for this series I wanted to achieve a real “object bias” where the image is never a window but a thing.
Frames:
In a way this show is also about framing. Frames are interesting because they are about delineation, making a border. We humans rely on delineation for all of our calculations. It allows us to analyze things in detail and determine risk and location in the environment. It gives us art and geometry and music and a sense of the universe but it also gives us racism, sexism, war. All of that seems born of the complexity of the universe and our necessarily simplified perspective being what we are. With that in mind I’ve always enjoyed questioning these distinctions – what is classified as what, and where things are located in perspective – where does one thing end and another begin, what things are in front of other things and when is it important. So I play with the transitions from two and three dimensions and the physical transitions from the work to the wall using these delineative distinctions.
Shadows:
Shadows are an addendum to the work, I don't control them but they are definitely part of the experience. Shadows are also a factor in the resulting flat abstraction of the images in that when a photograph is viewed as a geometric composition it is not important whether the subject is light or matter. There is only an area of this and an area of that.
-Ethan Ryman, 2021
ABOUT ETHAN RYMAN
Ethan Ryman was born in New York City. He attended Carnegie Mellon Drama School, The New School For Social Research / Eugene Lang College, and The New School Jazz and Contemporary Music Conservatory Program. Prior to his art career, Ryman engineered rap records for Wu-Tang Clan, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and others. In 2011, his work was exhibited in Serra Sabuncuoglu’s A Place To Which We Can Come at the St. Cecilia Convent in Greenpoint, and was selected for Tomorrow’s Stars at the Verge Art Brooklyn art fair. Other recent exhibitions include Facts of Life (2021) at Cathouse Proper; Hat Trick at DC Moore (2012); Patterns Of Interference at SHOW ROOM; and Lilly Wei’s “Light3” show at Fridman Gallery with Jan Tichy and Stephen Dean. Most recently he showed his series ‘The Band – An installation of Obstructivist Constructions and Related Photo-Sculptural Objects’ at 524 Projects, Brooklyn, NY.
To reserve a time to visit, please email info@artcake.org.
Read Phong Bui’s review of Ethan Ryman - Series: Still Lives and Dioramas in The Brooklyn Rail.
Images: STILL LIFE #5, 2021. Dye sublimation on aluminum, painted wood shelf. 13 1/2 x 14 3/4 x 7 inches. Edition of 10. Courtesy the artist. Installation view, Ethan Ryman - Series: Still Lives and Dioramas, Art Cake, Brooklyn, NY, 2021. Photographs by Dario Lasagni.