JO RYAN - 'Communication Landscape'
Red Gallery – 14th – 31st March 2019
The front rooms to the gallery are devoted to the paintings of Robert
Babic and Christian Hansen, while the rear holds thirty-eight medium to small
works by Jo Ryan. Her work takes the novel medium of hand-cut adhesive vinyl,
augmented with spray stencils and aerosol, mostly on metal supports. The work
offers surprisingly subtle and astute contributions to familiar themes of text
and contemporary culture. The title of her show, ‘Communication Landscape’
alludes to the broader placing of text within the urban landscape, the
juxtaposition of advertising, information or instruction and graffiti within
adjacent and overlapping planes and the unexpected inflections therein.
They’re All Talking At Once (2016) 60 X 75cm vinyl, enamel, aerosol
stencil on found metal sign
Ordinarily, this would be the province of photography, documenting
fleeting fashions, ornament and messages on the street. But while the artist
commences from such documentation, she is intent upon something more graphic in
every sense. In ‘They’re All Talking At Once’ (2016) the picture is literally
built upon a found sign, preserving the original warning for explosives in red
and white areas while allowing degrees of transparency to it in others. The
work does not just depict the situation of public signage but enacts or
instantiates the very process of overlaid, competing and interrupted texts as a landscape. Similarly, adhesive
vinyl itself is primarily used in commercial signage and graphics; where computer
programmed cutting of texts has largely replaced traditional brushed lettering.
Yet, in Ryan’s pictures, the vinyl must be painstakingly hand-cut in order to
achieve something like the precision of computer graphics. Paradoxically, the
work turns a streamlined industrial material into an intricately crafted private
statement, actually closer to Matisse’s cut-outs than an inkjet print from a
vector graphic.
So the work is firstly about building a picture from texts, about texts
as part of a wider landscape. And while perspectival planes to texts can suggest
a deeper space, at some point the picture encounters parts of the landscape
that are plainly not text and here interestingly, Ryan takes greater license or
abstracts objects while maintaining an overall perspective, as in High Street (2017)
High Street (2017) 120 X 100cm vinyl and aerosol on
aluminium
This
contrast between the detail or realism of text with the general perspective to
surroundings continues to be something the artist reviews. Predictably, the
impression is then closer to Pop Art and a contrast between text and
illustration. In an older work, such as Terminus
No 1 (2015) architecture supplies the unifying perspective to planes in
surprising detail, albeit on a separate support, but the trend has mainly been
to simplify settings, to locate texts within a perspectival layout as much as a
landscape
Terminus No. 1 (2015) 24 X 42 cm spray stencils
on plywood vinyl and enamel on clear acrylic overlay (slight reflection to
photograph)
This attention to text largely derives from Pop Art of course, but while
many of Ryan’s texts have commercial print sources, it is notable the care and
accuracy she also lavishes upon graffiti tags. Again one is struck by the
paradox between an approach built upon commercial process but now directed to
the most spontaneous and fleeting of scripts or pictograms. While the temptation
is to treat her work as a late variant on Pop (perhaps related to the work of
Howard Arkley, for example, or the American, Lari Pittman) it nevertheless
takes text on much more expansive terms, as cues to a larger graphic landscape
that is not confined to print means (all appearances to the contrary) and
surely deserves wider recognition.
The convergence of fine art with graphics, of the artist with curator or
designer, is a commonplace issue in the art world. The reverse is much less
remarked upon, of graphics aspiring to fine art. It comes as no surprise to
learn that Ryan is a graphic designer of senior standing (with her own company)
although her efforts toward fine art have unfortunately been curtailed by
pressures of work, family and health in recent years. The show thus includes
work over a four or five year period and in truth probably includes too much
for what is quite a small space. But one can hardly blame her for grasping what
opportunities present themselves; for giving it everything.
Autumn in Abbotsford (2017) 120 X 100 cm vinyl and aerosol on
aluminium
In other works landscape is less in evidence than a complementary
pattern for text, as in the series of imported packages of food products, such
as Celebration (Italy) (2017) where
text is augmented with a suitably Italianate pattern to a plate, an imposed
scrollery and origin label.
Celebration (Italy) (2017) 60 X 40 cm vinyl and aerosol on
aluminium
Initially, these look even less the work of patient adhesive vinyl
cut-outs and stencilled pattern, but these too are concerned with a context for
package design, with placing text within a graphics context, yet without
falling into mere illustration. It is a delicate brief. However, this is
precisely the territory where the artist finds surprising expression, in the
dogged manual tracing of fonts by scalpel, in the rigorous exclusion of
photographic incidentals, in the flattened flatness of label and plate, where
edge or outline is all, colour rich for industrial consistency. The message is
quietly strict. This severity may be subtle but its means literally sever
material, are incisive in the true sense. This love of incision is even
celebrated by a tattoo of a scalpel on the artist’s lower leg. We have
personality here. The work is also conspicuously accumulative, as each colour
and shape adds a tiny layer of vinyl to the picture surface, something the modest
scale of the work invites through close inspection. The result is an intricate,
labour intensive construction, at odds with its seemingly bland subject matter,
again teasing in its contradictions, drawing the work away from print origins
into a subtle collage of slices.
Playtime 2 (2017) 45 X 22.5 cm vinyl, aerosol and
felt-tip on commercial sign
While patterns provide less of a perspective or landscape for text, in
other works text itself is treated more abstractly, particularly through
inversion, such as Playtime 2 (2017).
Legibility is slightly disorientated, allowing appreciation of mere shape,
colour and composition. Here we have a range of texts and orientations that
still suggest the interruption and defacement of public texts but with no
discernible location. The diversity to text placement becomes a kind of abstraction,
of relevance to painting given the current revival in interest in abstraction,
but here pursued through a range of techniques that allude to the piecemeal accretions
to public signage. But this remains only one tangent to the artist’s project
and in conversation she seemed circumspect about greater formal concerns.
In summary then, ‘Communication Landscape’ deals in meaning not simply
through text or location of text but through associated patterns and motifs,
layered through diverse encounters and competing agendas and indeed through the
very materials and techniques the artist has adroitly turned to her purpose.
Communication there expresses a thoroughgoing incisiveness and delineation to
shapes and colour, a metaphor for dedication in the face of occasion, accident
and mixed messages. The work is in many ways the opposite of advertising, a
discursive communication. It is not a show for everyone to be sure, but this is
only to say it asks a little more of the viewer.
Duck Impressions (2018) 81X81 cm vinyl and aerosol on found
sign
