NYAB Event - Ryan Browning “Terra Mutante”

Ryan Browning “Terra Mutante”

Mulherin + Pollard

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Texas-born artist, Ryan Browning presents “Terra Mutante,” an exhibition of new paintings at Mulherin + Pollard. Browning is a painter and interdisciplinary artist whose art practice revolves around traditional concepts of space, new perceptual experiences such as video games and simulated virtual worlds, and the role images play in the construction of memory.

Browning paints magical and mysterious landscapes with elaborate cities carved into mountainsides, dark caves, and floating worlds all borne from his furtive video game mind. Miró-esque sculptures, rainbow colored ladders, oriental rugs, and bonfires speckle the shadowy creases and plateaus that inhabit these landscapes. Tall billowing columns of smoke rise throughout the works, as do unexplained ribbons of color that lyrically pull your attention between and within their depicted spaces, revealing the intricacies of fantastical worlds that beckon the viewer to further exploration.

Regarding the ideas employed within his works, Browning states: “I like games—playing them and designing scenarios and settings in which games of fantasy can take place. I’ve been playing role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons since I was a kid, and since I started painting, I began to realize that painting and role playing in such games are similar. In a game you imagine layers of surface and substance on a framework of governing rules. You give names to things that are otherwise represented by abstract data or systems, and you carve your way into that world by exploring and making changes to it. The rules allow the changes, but you imagine how those changes effect the unfolding of the game’s narrative, like the grave finality of the ‘death’ of the King in a game of chess. Painting is kind of the same. You get to know the territory. Once it becomes familiar, you begin to inhabit it, tell yourself stories about it.”

Browning earned a BA from Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, and an MFA from the Mount Royal School of Art at MICA in Baltimore, MD. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States, including solo and two person shows at Protocol Gallery in Gainesville, FL (2013); Creative Alliance (2012) and School 33 Art Center (2011) in Baltimore, MD; and his forthcoming solo show at Mulherin + Pollard Gallery in NYC (2014). His work has been featured in print in New American Paintings (2011, 2013), and he has participated in residencies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland (2011) and Harold Arts, OH (2010). He currently teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar, in Doha, Qatar.