LENAKAEIA
Ryan Wallace
MARCH 16 - APRIL 15, 2017
Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present Lenakaeia, its second solo exhibition with New York artist Ryan Wallace. Wallace will present a series of new paintings that continue his exploration into the perception of space, the combining of authored and accidental gestures, and how analog information is created, replicated and presented. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, March 16, 2017, from 6-9pm.
Ryan Wallace's work is sustained through a continuous cycle of creation, destruction, painting, tearing, seaming, de-stretching, and rebuilding. His studio is the site of production where compositions evolve organically from the interplay of his materials. Drop cloths, strips of canvas, metallic tape, light intrusions become the wellspring that initiates his self-perpetuating, self-sustaining, and self-determined process.
Wallace's new series takes inspiration from the light refractions cast upon the walls and ceiling by shimmering elements within a previous floor installation. In his very intuitive call-and-response approach, fleeting shapes are cut and moved, along with their corresponding negatives, around the studio floor into compositions that directly reference and extrapolate from the initial source. These shapes are indexed into paintings that capture, reinvent and memorialize the unexpected byproduct from earlier artworks and inspire the way a particular artwork's structure can give rise to associated effects. Ultimately, each piece is a trace, an imprint or even a ghost of the very things it refers to. The ethereal becomes tangible while finding purpose as another element in the continuous mapping of his terrain.
Ryan Wallace was born in 1977 in New York City, and lives and works in Brooklyn and East Hampton, New York. He received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Recent solo exhibitions include Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC; 56 Henry, NYC; Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto; Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco; and the Window on Broad, Rosenwald Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts, Philadelphia. His work has been exhibited at Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, University of Nevada Las Vegas; BAM, Brooklyn; Gerhard Hofland Gallery, Amsterdam; Boeske & Hofland, Leipzig; V1 Gallery, Copenhagen; Jerome Pauchant Gallery, Paris; and Rachel Uffner Gallery, NYC. Wallace’s works can be found in the collections of the RISD Museum, Providence; Museum of Modern Art, NYC; SF MoMA, San Francisco; Watermill Center, Watermill; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, among others.