‘one’

69 Smith Street Gallery
March 2-20, 2016

“Ryan’s work initially speaks to her skills as an illustrator. There is a level of craft evident, exhibited in the fine, detailed, hyper-realistic representation of everyday objects.

Nevertheless, there is much more here than simply an ability to execute.

Ryan employs techniques which, although simple, have a visceral impact. While the paintings are ostensibly photo-realistic representations of street scenes, complete with street signs, shop signage and graffiti, all the textual content is abstracted from the background and painted onto Perspex panels mounted a centimetre off the background. This technique separates the semiotic content from the environmental context in a clear, visceral way which serves to highlight the extent to which urban life is saturated by text, of varying levels of formality and register, which is written at different periods of history, and, importantly, written in different voices, each with different intent, all of which are overlaid to describe the built environment.

Moreover, the hyper-realist renderings of ostensibly mundane objects lend those objects, and the various layers of text imposed upon them, a kind of monumentality.

Is Ryan monumentalising street artists, or is she monumentalising vandals? In a sense, she does neither and both, since interestingly, her work treats street signs and shops signage with precisely the same respect that it treats the street art and tags, so in that sense, she acts as a dispassionate observer, documenting and throwing into sharp relief the semiological noise against the layers of historic background in the built environment we all traverse daily and take for granted.”

Dean.
24th October 2017