Ryan Mc Namara “Gently Used”
Mary Boone Gallery (Midtown)
This event has ended.
A celebrated artist whose work spans sculpture, video, photography, dance, and performance, Mc Namara brings wit and a historical consciousness to bear on our technologically mannered lives. In Gently Used, Mc Namara stages the relationship between “live” art and its math and aftermath, between event space and gallery space, giving special attention to the rub between the handmade prop and the mass-produced object. Like Mc Namara himself, all the works here are used —touched, felt, lived, riven.
Plastic works function as entertainers, actors who dance and move, enter and exit the stage, mark and miss their cues. The sources for Mc Namara’s gallery work are the same specialized materials that comprise his choreographed, live work: dancers’ costumes, props, archival images, promotional ephemera. He re-fashions this matter into collages and reliefs that extend from the wall, tumble over pedestals, emerge from the ceiling, and literally climb from their frames.
Gently Used is a relay powered by the mechanism of performance. Event generates material, material becomes art object, art object performs, only to be used as prop once again. The installation at Mary Boone Gallery reflects the cycle’s complex layers of material support, with special consideration given to the current trigger-happy nature of transmission and reception. This staging reconsiders the gallery space, today too often delimited as an anemic accessory to the still or screenshot. These works may look good in pictures, but the picture is not their final destination.
Media
Schedule
from January 08, 2015 to February 28, 2015