David Ryan Recent Works

Date: March 2007
Exhibition/Show Type: Solo
Media: Painting, Sound, Video

Exhibition Description

David Ryan Recent Work – at the Cut, Halesworth Suffolk March/April 2007

The Cut Archive Artist Entry for David Ryan

Paintings and a video installation were exhibited at the Cut in Halesworth in March/April 2007. While video and sound had, for some time, accompanied my practice as a painter, I was still searching and interrogating what might constitute a kind of abstraction in video.

I was intrigued by Morton Feldman’s observation of abstraction not as style or ‘form repertoire’ but as a kind of ‘consciousness’ engendered by the address of the work and the relationship between the viewer and work.

Like much of my work, the installation at the Cut, explored a kind of formal doubling in the space. Two large video screens faced each other with the sound rather obliquely positioned to the images. The video was in two parts (the title was Prelude-Postlude, yet another doubling, although this time temporal: before and after).

It used footage from two cities: London (Docklands) and Rome (EUR). The footage from London was perhaps the more ‘painterly’ – where superimposed blocks (reflecting my paintings) disrupted the space and yet constituted a kind of flow; by contrast, the Rome footage was relentlessly static (and silent), choosing a viewpoint from each end of a passageway in the EUR district.

Locating image and sound always plays with our memories, often of the cinematic. I was keen, however, in this instance to avoid narrative – and present simply a sense of different types of motion side by side.

I also showed paintings in the downstairs gallery, and it was very much an exhibition of two parts: painting downstairs, and then a video installation upstairs bringing together my work with image/sound/music. The paintings – as with the videos, albeit in a different way – explore blocks of material; either gestural, articulated or inflected in some way or else with interventions of a rather ‘deadpan’ nature.

The Cut Archive material for this exhibition is incomplete at this time.