Featured Artwork: Ryan Sluggett
This spectacular painting, made while the artist was living in Los Angeles, is part of a suite of paintings the artist began circa 2011 and that was subsequently exhibited at TrépanierBaer in 2013 in an exhibition titled Instabilities.
Alexander Nagel in his essay titled Ryan Sluggett Those Supposed Ruptures Are in Effect Flat to Us, published on the occasion of the exhibition Instabilities, wrote the following in the opening paragraphs of his essay:
“Ryan Sluggett’s paintings thrive on fine troublings of the picture surface that are lost in photos. Viewed in person, things start to come forward and settle back, partly due to pictorial effects and partly because they are made up of real layering and stitchings and various media applied in different ways. We register these discontinuities, start to ask about them. We selectively ignore and work with the relation between the real layerings and juxtapositions and the drawn and painted ones.
That relation provides an environment in which we start to learn how to live. I don’t want to be too dramatic about it, since what we live through in these paintings is pretty analogous to what we live through in our daily life, but something momentous happens, and that happening is the environment I am talking about. It allows us to inhabit a way of seeing and also to reflect on that seeing. It is not exactly the artist’s way of seeing. At the same time, arbitrary noise is kept from simply overwhelming the mix. It’s a personal view and it is accessible, habitable by all.”
Lucky eyes!
Alexander Nagel; Ryan Sluggett, Instabilities (TrépanierBaer, 2013) p.2
Ryan Sluggett
Lucky Eyes, 2011
Fabric dye, acrylic, alkyd and oil on coloured fabric in dark green artist frame
112″ x 62″ / 284.5 x 157.5 cm