LIZA Fragment Liza Ryan: Fragment Curated by Amy G
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
T h e e l e a n o r D . W i l s o n M u s e u M LIZa fRagment Liza Ryan: Fragment Curated by Amy G. Moorefield, Director Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University Ryan March 8 - April 21, 2012 12 Liza Ryan: Fragment by Amy G. Moorefield, Director Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University 22 Rare Bloom: Catch and Release by Johanna Ruth Epstein, Ph.D. Hollins University Assistant Professor of Art 42 Artist Biography 48 List of Works 8 9 10 In her exhibition Fragment, on view at the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University, Los Angeles-based artist Liza Ryan investigates a litany of experiences that progress gradually through her evocative and sublime imagery. Ryan’s individual works Liza Ryan: Fragment hold hefty information; as groupings, they create Amy G. Moorefield, Director idiosyncratic associations that transform Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University common moments into eerie fantasies. At the core of the exhibition, Ryan explores the notion of fragmentation, both literally and symbolically. She comments, “The fragmented, nonlinear narrative in the work mirrors our lived experiences in this sensory overloaded, information saturated, visually bombarded world.”1 Documenting the minutiae of our lives via fragments, she combines disparate elements to represent the chaos of our time. Ryan works with photographs that she intermittently marks with ink or graphite. Her “language” includes cutting, collage, editing, appropriating, reframing and sequencing images into layered and evocative cabinets of curiosities. Her images are collected using a variety of cameras: digital, medium and large format, 35mm, toy cameras such as the Diana and Holga. She uses the medium of photography to “capture life as experienced”2 versus as a documentary tool. Usually employing natural light, the work has 12 13 a real time appeal that cannot be captured by other means. In Seer, 2011, hands hold creamy milk over a patterned bowl. Ryan’s use of natural light suffuses the image and illuminates all. Hands, bowl and light become one. The camera acts as a divinatory mechanism, weighing light’s physicality as well as its implied metaphysical nature. Ryan believes that we experience the world in stories. Her titles such as Hover, Something tells me she didn’t look back, Examine My Stare, and This is No Place I Knew imply action and spark an intense wordplay/image interchange. Her images become interwoven into often-fragmented chapters. The pastiche groupings dovetail into deliberate dances that engage viewers in all directions of the composition; in many cases they push us to look at the periphery of the work, as in I Sew Myself Together from 2007. Comprised of twenty-one photographs arranged in a waterfall shape, the collage draws our gaze to the left and right margins of the work. Beginning with a mouth exhaling breath on the left side, our eye travels up through images of a fragmented body juxtaposed with views of nature, often referencing each other in a gesture (a torso twisted akin to a tree trunk) or a shape (the body of an eel mimicking the split in the flesh of a pomegranate). Selected images of the body are tattooed with graphite alluding to the texture of bark, further emphasizing the transformative relationship between human and nature. Our exploration 14 15 ends on the right with a woman’s mouth sucking in the breath that was depicting images of chaos and beauty, motion and stillness, tension and released by her twin on the opposite side of the composition. About her work, release, Ryan builds a pictorial flood across the museum’s environment. Ryan refers to the tension between internal and the external worlds and From blooming azaleas to forceful explosions, she offers provocative images the terror and exhilaration involved when the two meet. 3 to create experiences congruent to us all. Deconstruction and reconstruction are among Ryan’s core proclivities. In Lawrence Weschler’s book, Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences, In Exploded Moment, 2010, she deliberately strips apart an image of a tree with he outlines our human ability to merge past events into kinships that conjoin amber and yellow leaves on a field of dark green loamy earth and combines disparate relationships in time. He observes, “I myself have increasingly these pieces with strips of other photographs. Ryan then methodically found myself being visited by similarly uncanny moments of convergences, reconstructs the image, repositioning the strips and subtlely conjoining bizarre associations, eerie rhymes, whispered recollections—sometimes selected sections with graphite. In the resulting collage, the residue of the in the weirdest places.” 4 Narrative in nature and self referential, Ryan’s work gold leaves resembles an exploding constellation. Driven by Ryan’s interest in touches non-sequentially on a timeline, creating a powerful rhythm the subjectivity of time, she “explodes the moment.” Seconds are slowed through divergent and convergent images. Look carefully; her uncanny and down and reconfigured, allowing the viewer the opportunity to experience deliberate selections alternately reveal and conceal the human condition. felt time rather than measured time. The pinnacle work on view is Ryan’s newest cinematic creation: a site-specific wall collage titled Rare Bloom, 2012. Measuring sixteen feet in height by forty feet in width and undulating from the wall in projections anywhere from five-eights of an inch to three and a quarter inches,Rare Bloom is comprised 1 Email exchange with the artist, January 2012. 4 Weschler, Lawrence. Everything that Rises: 2 Interview with the artist, December 2011. A Book Of Convergences. 2006. McSweeney Books: of one hundred and eighty images, several drawn on with white ink. Alternately 3 Ibid. San Francisco. 1. 16 17 18 19 20 21 Liza Ryan chronicles tension and release, opposites existing together. grid. Cropping and blurring renders individual shots anonymous, but they “Terror co-exists with exhilaration” she says, “beauty with horror.” Her recent maintain, for the most part, an insistent aloofness, rarely touching each other, work explores the intertwinement of body and landscape. Since 2006, defying easy integration. she has created a steadily growing collection Rare Bloom: Catch and Release of work that contributes to a visual conversation A significant precursor toRare Bloom is included in the current exhibition. Johanna Ruth Epstein, Ph.D. in which numerous artists have engaged. Something tells me she didn’t look back (2006) is inspired by the myth of Apollo Hollins University Assistant Professor of Art Rauschenberg’s combines, Sally Mann’s and Daphne, a narrative of a struggle between two bodies in which one truncated glimpses of family, Bruce Nauman’s twists out of the other’s grasp. Overlapping color photographs create a mass “Studies for Holograms,” Harry Callahan’s fondly fetishistic portraits of that moves with an upward sweep toward the right, as if the ghost of Bernini his wife, and above all, Annette Messager’s clustered and isolated body parts, were breathing life into it (his sculpture is similar in form). come to mind. These artists converse in a strange but intimate body language. Rare Bloom also evolves from left to right. Its energy is initiated by a single For me, Ryan’s works create an organic sensation of movement. Rare Bloom, gesture at the far left: a hand shaking open a fan. From the initial frame an installation piece comprised of individual photographs spanning an (the fan’s open crescent) a flurry of cinematic, close-cropped fragments unfurls, eighteen-by-twenty-foot stretch of wall at the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum, snippets of the human, animal and natural world, presenting us with a presents us with moment-to-moment encounters with contrast: division/unity, fractured narrative. Rare Bloom engages the natural associative inclinations containment/overflow, earth/sky, stillness/movement. Mounted on individual of the mind and eye. From below, a dandelion resembles a jellyfish. Placed wooden supports, Ryan’s bloom of images pushes off the wall at various together like window panes, four identical close ups of blooming azaleas take depths, expanding across and up its surface as if lifted by an air current, on the smoldering glow and geometric regularity of stained glass. advancing and retreating from the eye not unlike bubbles, birds, balloons, or dandelion fluff (subjects of individual photographs within the piece). Ryan is drawn to the inherent tension of spheres, which punctuate the The right-angled edges of Ryan’s photographs impose the discipline of a installation in various natural forms. The orb of the sun, helium balloons, 22 23 mouths blowing bubbles, birds in flight, and a yellow bird held tightly eye’s final climb. At the right edge the images begin their ascent to a spot in a closed fist, are themes that recur throughout. Other themes—a hand halfway up the wall, where the hand reappears, shutting the fan. holding an egg, two feet side by side, swirls of hair framing the top of a bald head, or two thumbs prying open the lips of a dog to expose its fangs, When asked about her photographic techniques, the artist speaks of feeling for instance—appear only once, and suggest emphatic narrative purpose. restricted by orthodoxy, what she terms “pristine” photography. “It’s about At regular intervals, a lace-gloved hand materializes, directing the boundary breaking and movement” states Ryan, who uses “whatever comes flow of energy. to hand,” including medium format, 35 millimeter, toy and digital cameras. When drawing closer to individual photographs, we see what have been In a crescendo of color and tension, Ryan’s enigmatic narrative builds called the artist’s “surprises”— additional white pigment emphasizing specific toward a climax. Black and white scenes of abundance and ether— passages—the halo around the sun, for instance, or billowing sea spray at cumulus clouds, blinding sunlight through tall trees, white helium balloons, the shoreline.