NYAB Event - Kay Ruane "Room with a View"

Kay Ruane "Room with a View"

Jenkins Johnson Projects

This event has ended.

Jenkins Johnson Gallery presents "Room with a View", a solo exhibition of new works by Kay Ruane. They will be on view in the Project Room at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in New York.

There is something inherently dramatic in the conflict of a figure at a window, watching the world outside, while existing in a different world inside. Kay Ruane’s new drawings in Room with a View embrace and enhance this conflict, giving the viewer a group of tiny graphite worlds in which Ruane’s distinctive and highly crafted style is enhanced by a subtle dose of humor and sexuality. The work lures the viewer into a richly appointed, vaguely familiar room only to suddenly invade this tranquility by juxtaposing it with a sense of doom and disaster as inflicted by the scene outside the window.

Physics seems to present a scene of a woman enjoying an afternoon cocktail while looking out the window, until one notices the plane crashing outside, presenting an uncomfortable contrast: how can she rest so serenely while observing the tragedy outside? Similarly, Empress shows the figure contemplating a pagoda while a helicopter flies over it to douse the unseen flames threatening to envelope it like a forest fire. Each drawing also manifests a theme in its treatment of details, with exacting and microscopic attention paid to specifics, like the title of a book thrown carelessly on a table or an anonymous painting on the wall. These themes sometimes explore another aspect of detachment, one related to a cultural disconnection between the figure and the minutiae of her space. The detailed objects inside evoke a sense of longing in the figure, who seems to want to be part of a different physical reality and the culture it embodies, while at the same time, she is unwilling to leave the safety of her interior world in order to experience that other world outside the window.

As with the meticulous painters of the Northern Renaissance, Ruane’s drawings are crafted with the utmost precision and care; she offers a world in which even a small detail, like the trophy on the wall in Hound, could stand alone as a piece of art itself. Similar to painters like Van Eyck, Ruane spends an extensive amount of time perfecting every detail of each piece; a single drawing often requires building up as many as seven layers of graphite, with each pass adding more detail and tonal range in order for her to create an end result that is precisely perfected and flawless.

[Image: Kay Ruane "Physics" (2008) graphite and gouache on paper, 11 x 17 in.]