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A California-born sculptor, Ryan produces meticulously crafted interpretations of everyday objects that prompt meditation on themes of seduction and repulsion, refinement and excess. Profoundly influenced by her West Coast roots, the artist often focuses on pop-cultural artifacts associated with Los Angeles, such as muscle cars and bowling balls, alongside biological forms like fruit, flowers, and spiderwebs. By applying traditional craftsmanship to natural and industrial materials in a wide range of scales and formats, Ryan unites the organic and the artificial, transforming her subjects into tongue-in-cheek allegories for the entropic cycle of life and death. While offering a critique of contemporary life and society, Ryan is also fascinated by the wider contexts and histories of visual culture. In Bacchante (2015), a sculptural reinterpretation of a 1627 portrait by Hendrick ter Brugghen, she uses concrete casts of balloons to explore the sensual tension evident in the painter's depiction of grapes—an impression offset by her clustered forms' interconnecting chains. In the nostalgia-tinged Satellite in Repose (2019), hand-modeled ceramic forms perch like parrots on the skeletal remnant of a satellite dish, the stalactite-like appearance of their tails lending the entire structure a fossilized look and adding to its ambivalent stance toward technological progress and obsolescence. And in the Generator series (2022–), oyster-like hinged sections of automobile bodies enclose delicate metallic and crystalline spiderwebs. In Ryan's series Bad Fruit (2018–), pieces of decaying fruit are wittily reimagined in unexpected materials at altered scale. Mining the American decorative craft tradition of pin-beaded fruit, the artist encrusts each carved form's surface with glass and acrylic beads to delineate "fresh" parts and semiprecious stone beads such as agate, garnet, and turquoise for "rotten" areas, producing the impression of partial decomposition. Through this conceptual and material disjunction, the series explores ideas of desire and overconsumption that resonate with the illusory excesses of contemporary culture. Bad Melon (2020) is a scatter of giant watermelon chunks built from glass beads, stones, and other objects. The rind of each piece is made of aluminum salvaged from a 1973 Airstream Safari camper, an iconic leisure vehicle redolent of postwar optimism, the surface of which is now rusty and scratched. Through this juxtaposition, the work evokes both the death of an American dream, and the resilient life embodied by coral as it envelops and repurposes a submerged wreck. Among Ryan's recent exhibition projects was Spotlight: Kathleen Ryan, at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco. This featured Screwdriver (2023), for which the artist transformed the trunk of a 1968 AMC Javelin into the rind of an orange slice in a huge sculptural cocktail garnish. Ryan's first museum survey also opened this year, at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany, and will travel to Kistefos Museum, |
