May 2008: Going to Sheep
Ryan Agnew
--Press Release--
A solo art exhibit, Going to Sheep, featuring Columbus artist, Ryan Agnew, will be up for viewing at Root Art Gallery for the month of May. Agnew's work includes many different mediums, including video, photography, and sculpture that come together to create a journey through thought, theory, idea, and experience. An artist reception will be held Fri., May 2nd from 6-9pm at Root Art Center.
Agnew creates art with a childlike faith, fervor, and fear-tracking the efforts of physical and emotional maintenance in a culture marked by consumption. This exhibition, which includes both new and older pieces, evokes the circular labor of grief and mourning, and the process of measuring past presence with present absence.
A series of four large inkjet prints, Mr. Aloysius Magillicutty (Dad), explores a singular moment of human fragility where we simultaneously encounter discomfort and serenity, absence and presence. The four prints come from one photograph taken by the artist after the passing of his father, hinting at an irretrievable presence the image can neither capture nor restore and addressing photography's status as a static inscription of loss. The resulting work disrupts and complicates the artist's grief process while presenting movement toward reclaiming healthy subjectivity. On the lighter side, a seven-minute video entitled Worm Man At Dharma Farm takes place in Gambier, Ohio, and documents an ongoing performance suggesting comical conflicts between the body's base realities and the mind's idealized wishes.
Other works in the exhibition comprise drawing and sculpture, which exploit material commonly found in a home improvement center (polyester fiber insulation, garden hose, plaster) or a grocery store (toothpaste, sunburn relief gel, baby wipes, the absorbent cotton lining of adult diapers, mouthwash). The materials Agnew chooses, the actions he performs on them, and the manner in which objects are placed are all important facets of his work. A shift of focus between detail and overall composition can be applied to the individual pieces, or the exhibition as a whole. Each work serves as a compositional element, or character in a virtual environment, wherein even the visitor becomes another player within the scene.
Agnew was born in 1978 in Arlington, Virginia and currently lives in Columbus, Ohio where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from The Ohio State University in 2003. He is currently teaching Digital Image Manipulation at Ohio State - Mansfield, and Real and Recorded Time Arts at the university's main campus.
The artist will be present at an opening reception Fri., May 2th from 6-9pm at Root Art Center, 212 S. Main St. in downtown Mount Vernon. For more information call Katie or Andy Lane at (740)326-3126 or e-mail at rootartcenter@gmail.com.