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Thursday, November 5, 2009

Visual Art Currently Hanging: Ryan Molenkamp, Sharon Arnold, and Trevor Johnson

Posted by Jen Graves on Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 10:26 AM

Ryan Molenkamp

Last night at Vermillion was a quiet opening (the loud opening is tomorrow night) of We Built This to Leave, a show of crawling, breathing, shadow-casting structures—a show that reveals the built environment to be the network of obsessive, pumping bodies it is—by Ryan Molenkamp, Sharon Arnold, and Trevor Johnson.

Each artist is a resonator for the others. Molenkamp's paintings look like they reveal scaffoldings of unseen sedimentary deposits all around us, whole cities whose scale is always shifting. Johnson's carved Styrofoam universes jutting out from the wall are alternative maps to the same sort of indeterminate locations. It is not clear where they've been cut and where they've been torn, and the odd breaks of the surfaces resemble ice floes. They cast dark, jagged shadows.

Ryan Molenkamp

Meanwhile, Arnold's delicate works are bright and light, at risk of floating off if they weren't pinned to the wall and grounded by their own heartbeats. Their rhythms are created by repetitive motions: the sewing of soft, hairy yarns in rows on hundreds of feet of fragile cash-register paper, hung in half-unspooled rolls on the wall; the cutting away of dozens of strips of paper to reveal, curtain-like or hair-like, the wall beneath the paper.

It is a tight, teeming universe in there. These are images shot during the installation. But as (almost) always, you have to see it to get it.

Ryan Molenkamp

Comments (5) RSS

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Appears to be a bunch of derivative abstractions hanging beside equally unimaginative nineteen-seventies conceptual pieces to me. Nothing new or visually interesting here.

Posted by FreudianShrimp on November 5, 2009 at 11:40 AM

@1 Think I'll reserve my judgement for seeing it person than a couple of small jpgs.

But then again, I am looking forward to First Thursday tonight. I hope that you hit the galleries too.

Posted by Senor Guy on November 5, 2009 at 11:51 AM