Ryan Kitson “A Post, a Pot, a Painting - Cheep Meet”

Cleopatra's

poster for Ryan Kitson “A Post, a Pot, a Painting - Cheep Meet”

This event has ended.

For our second to last exhibition located at 110 Meserole Avenue in Greenpoint, New York, Cleopatra’s presents the creative visions of long-time friend and gifted artist, Ryan Kitson. The title of the show is A Post, a Pot, a Painting - Cheep Meet.

The below text is written by Ryan as description of his thinking and process for the exhibition. It remains for the most part unedited:

Earlier this year I was setting up to make this vessel loosely based on the chaos of a wild turkey taking flight, but inevitably all sorts of things interfere, you can’t predict anything…. Water-based clay is a sensitive and fast-moving material, directly translating any attack of our limited human strength with ease. There is nothing between it and us, making it the ideal medium to express malformed hunches that are personal without having to know exactly what you wanna say. The language of sculpture should be one of visceral reaction, not structured analytic chronology. If you can manage to put yourself in the right set of conditions for action the nature of the material allows for the possibility of making something unknown. To start, I used a potters wheel to maximize the fluidity/speed of the clay and get things cooking just on the edge of my control and open it up, expanding its solid mass to an ever-growing, slippery spinning vessel into which I can cast the evidence of action. Relevant and neutral objects are hastily inserted into the interior walls of the vessel in a non-considered way, the plaster is poured. The resulting cast of the event documents whatever shit went down like a freelance conspiracist pouring hydrocal into a fabricated bigfoot print. This set of circumstances is not without artifice, and the following decoration events are a mandatory reinforcement synonymous with this problem slash opportunity. The iridescent source material for the hydrographic surface application was a small woven pocket-basket with a lid that I was given a few weeks prior. What I didn’t initially consider was that this small basket vessel was used to heroically deliver me some very necessary medicine while on a work trip in a time of “desperation”. I now had to reckon with this surface, this project was no longer just an abstract gobbler, yet the overall gesture of burst and fall had remained acutely accurate. What was intended to be a fantasy of arrowing a wild turkey is now inescapably a reminder of the kindness one receives amidst the biological curse of your standard case of explosive diarrhea.

While sifting through photos from a trip a particular image from an owl cafe in Harajuku caught my attention. Amongst hundreds of photos of this incredibly enlightening yet nauseating experience was an f2.8 pic of the smallest and oldest owl of the dozen or so tethered and perched around on astroturf wrapped c-stands in a windowless room(cafe). This weathered old bird was scraggly sharp and crystal-clear within the narrow hollow of focus within the shallow depth of field. The background being a soft, out of focus portion of wallpaper with cartoon imagery of the same species as the subject, an owl. Inversely, the same distance from the owl to the wallpapered wall was me, the visitor behind the camera whose actual mental perception of the subject was just as if not more out of focus and blurry than the anthropomorphized renderings on the wall. It was, my hope, that the act of slowly enlarging/personalizing this image with oil paint would give me some time to sit on the couch of delusion until it was too comfortable to bear. It started to work and have realized I need more time to focus on these contradictory issues of anthropomorphism, more specifically in regards to food.

-Ryan Kitson March 2018

Media

Schedule

from April 02, 2018 to April 22, 2018

Opening Reception on 2018-04-02 from 19:00 to 21:00

Artist(s)

Ryan Kitson

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