Ryan Wallace at COOPER COLE

Artist: Ryan Wallace

Exhibition title: Dragnalus

Venue: COOPER COLE, Toronto, Canada

Date: January 22 – February 20, 2016

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and COOPER COLE, Toronto

COOPER COLE is pleased to present a solo exhibition with New York-based artist, Ryan Wallace. This marks the artists first solo exhibition in Canada. Taking its title from the post-hardcore band, Unwound’s ode to apathy, boredom and the repetition of daily existence, Wallace’s work-a-day approach mines beauty from his utilitarian materials and dogged spacial investigations.

Wallace’s output is a cycle of continuously constructed, razed, rebuilt and re-flattened information. Like a field of fossils, the floor of the gallery is an optical vista of tiles that both support and trap the materials employed in his paintings and sculptures.

On the wall, his works appear as segments or selections, dredged from depths below and presented as spoils of this archeology. Upon further inspection, their accomplished compositions and surfaces reveal a keen understanding of abstract space and painting strategy. Visually, these large works are simultaneously evocative of both aerial and microscopic perspectives, yet they are assembled from recognizable “real” elements of industrial materials.

All of his work evolves from both the act of making and those materials that have been cast off, removed, and redacted from previous works. Like a scavenger in an ecosystem, Wallace continually churns what is at hand in the studio, as the waste of one system becomes the structure of another.

Ryan Wallace (b. 1977, New York, USA) is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, a 2011 Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant awardee and an Elizabeth Foundation of the Arts’ Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop SIP Fellow. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at Susan Inglett Gallery, Rachel Uffner Gallery, Islip Art Museum, Islip, New York, Romer Young Gallery, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, The Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles, American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, PIMA Air & Space Museum, Tucson, USA; Marianne Friis Gallery, V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark; Frans Masreel Center, Kasterlee, Belgium; amongst many others. His work is featured in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, U.S. Department of the Treasury, Washington, Watermill Center, Watermill, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, USA. Wallace lives and works between New York City and East Hampton, USA.