ARTicle
JO RYAN – ‘Communication Landscape’
Melbourne art scene – Review by Gerry Bell
The front rooms to the gallery are devoted to the paintings of Robert Babic and Christian Hansen, while the rear holds thirty-eight medium to small works by Jo Ryan. She works in the novel medium of hand-cut adhesive vinyl, augmented with spray stencils and aerosol, mostly on metal supports. The work offers surprisingly subtle and astute contributions to familiar themes of text and contemporary culture. The title of her show, ‘Communication Landscape’ alludes to the broader placing of text within the urban landscape, the juxtaposition of advertising, information or instruction and graffiti within adjacent and overlapping planes and the unexpected inflections therein.
Ordinarily, this would be the province of photography, documenting fleeting fashions, ornament and messages on the street. But while the artist commences from such documentation, she is intent upon something more graphic in every sense. In They’re All Talking At Once (2016) the picture is literally built upon a found sign, preserving the original warning for explosives in red and white areas while allowing degrees of transparency to it in others. The work does not just depict the situation of public signage but enacts or instantiates the very process of overlaid, competing and interrupted texts as a landscape. Similarly, adhesive vinyl itself is primarily used in commercial signage and graphics; where computer-programmed cutting of texts has largely replaced traditional brushed lettering. Yet, in Ryan’s pictures, the vinyl must be painstakingly hand-cut in order to achieve something like the precision of computer graphics. Paradoxically, the work turns a streamlined industrial material into an intricately crafted private statement, actually closer to Matisse’s cut-outs than an inkjet print from a vector graphic.
So the work is firstly about building a picture from texts, about texts as part of a wider landscape. And while perspective planes to texts can suggest a deeper space, at some point the picture encounters parts of the landscape that are plainly not text and here interestingly, Ryan takes greater license or abstracts objects while maintaining an overall perspective, as in High Street (2017).
This contrast between the detail or realism of text with the general perspective to surroundings continues to be something the artist reviews. Predictably, the impression is then closer to Pop Art and a contrast between text and illustration. In an older work, such as Terminus No 1 (2015) architecture supplies the unifying perspective to planes in surprising detail, albeit on a separate support, but the trend has mainly been to simplify settings, to locate texts within a perspective layout as much as a landscape.
This attention to text largely derives from Pop Art of course, but while many of Ryan’s texts have commercial print sources, it is notable the care and accuracy she also lavishes upon graffiti tags. Again one is struck by the paradox between an approach built upon commercial process but now directed to the most spontaneous and fleeting of scripts or pictograms. While the temptation is to treat her work as a late variant on Pop (perhaps related to the work of Howard Arkley, for example, or the American, Lari Pittman) it nevertheless takes text on much more expansive terms, as cues to a larger graphic landscape that is not confined to print means (all appearances to the contrary) and surely deserves wider recognition.
The convergence of fine art with graphics, of the artist with curator or designer, is a commonplace issue in the art world. The reverse is much less remarked upon, of graphics aspiring to fine art. It comes as no surprise to learn that Ryan is a graphic designer of senior standing (with her own company) although her efforts toward fine art have unfortunately been curtailed by pressures of work, family and ill-health in recent years. The show thus includes work over a four or five year period and in truth probably includes too much for what is quite a small space. But one can hardly blame her for grasping what opportunities present themselves; for giving it everything.
In other works landscape is less in evidence than a complementary pattern for text, as in the series of imported packages of food products, such as Celebration (Italy) (2017) where text is augmented with a suitably Italianate pattern to a plate, an imposed scrollery and origin label.
Initially, these look even less the work of patient adhesive vinyl cut-outs and stenciled pattern, but these too are concerned with a context for package design, with placing text within a graphics context, yet without falling into mere illustration. It is a delicate brief. However, this is precisely the territory where the artist finds surprising expression, in the dogged manual tracing of fonts by scalpel, in the rigorous exclusion of photographic incidentals, in the flattened flatness of label and plate, where edge or outline is all, colour rich for industrial consistency. The message is quietly strict. This severity may be subtle but its means literally sever material, are incisive in the true sense. This love of incision is even celebrated by a tattoo of a scalpel on the artist’s lower leg. We have personality here. The work is also conspicuously accumulative, as each colour and shape adds a tiny layer of vinyl to the picture surface, something the modest scale of the work invites through close inspection. The result is an intricate, labour intensive construction, at odds with its seemingly bland subject matter, again teasing in its contradictions, drawing the work away from print origins into a subtle collage of slices.
While patterns provide less of a perspective or landscape for text, in other works text itself is treated more abstractly, particularly through inversion, such as Playtime 2 (2017). Legibility is slightly disorientated, allowing appreciation of mere shape, colour and composition. Here we have a range of texts and orientations that still suggest the interruption and defacement of public texts but with no discernible location. The diversity to text placement becomes a type of abstraction, of relevance to painting given the current revival in interest in abstraction, but here pursued through a range of techniques that allude to the piecemeal accretions to public signage. But this remains only one tangent to the artist’s project and in conversation she seemed circumspect about greater formal concerns.
In summary then, ‘Communication Landscape’ deals in meaning not simply through text or location of text but through associated patterns and motifs, layered through diverse encounters and competing agendas and indeed through the very materials and techniques the artist has adroitly turned to her purpose. Communication there expresses a thoroughgoing incisiveness and delineation to shapes and colour, a metaphor for dedication in the face of occasion, accident and mixed messages. The work is in many ways the opposite of advertising, a discursive communication. It is not a show for everyone to be sure, but this is only to say it asks a little more of the viewer.
