Artist Kathleen Ryan’s Beautiful Blight

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and your spoiled lunch is artist Kathleen Ryan’s next masterpiece. Her sculptures—both arrestingly brilliant and blighted—impart a transmissible thrill found not in denying the logic of mortality or memory, but in exposing their underbelly. Observe the binned raspberry whose mold-spore matrices are made effervescent under Ryan’s meticulous hand. A halved peach with a Harley Davidson engine for a pit. A toy ring—one a child might beg for, receive and discard in the same weekend—rendered as a votive statue, too heavy to hold and, like so many of her works, too bewitching to forget. 

Ryan’s recently closed exhibition at Karma Los Angeles, “Souvenir,” unveiled nine sculptures and, with them, a referendum on the decadent and the grotesque. In the first room of the show, two shimmering slices of oversized bread, Starstruck and Sunset Strip, leaned up against separate walls like props in a cabaret. Starstruck is at once a cremated slice of toast and an unspooled geode. A golden crumb—rendered in quilt-patterned tufts of jasper, amber and tiger’s eye beads—is banked alongside pools of obsidian and lava rock that ebb and flow in interchanging spirals and starbursts. Sunset Strip, pinkish and rotting, boasts a campaign of gray and purple smears that echo cumulus clouds coasting along a dusky sky.

“Bad Fruits,” a corpus of gem-encrusted fruits frozen in various phases of decay, is perhaps Ryan’s most well-known series, but it is only one variation on a frequently revisited theme. She often mines everyday ephemera for inspiration and subject matter: hot rods, motorcycles, citrus and disposable kitsch. Her practice is Pop, yet she’s more partial to the unseemly, ubiquitous parts of modern life than its fashions and novelties. For Ryan, ironically, art is all about the rust, and not the diamonds.

Ryan’s sculptures inspire awe as easily as they do disgust. In fact, they seize upon this dynamic with vigor, reconstituting what is beautiful and what is abject. The rot is as much an ornate program as it is a patch of Penicillium. Dreamhouse—a moldering majesty the size of a garden shed—is a testament to this fact. A bramble appears in clusters of vibrant scarlet drupelets, lapped up in fissures of jade, azure, seafoam and lilac manifestations of mold. The center of the raspberry opens onto a grotto of opalescent quartz stalactites and ridges of amethyst. Ryan often reserves semiprecious stones for the rotten bits, most of them applied with their imperfect, incongruent edges intact.

In scale and magnanimity alone, Ryan’s sculptures are commensurate with public monuments, but they almost always serve an opposite function from statues dedicated to venerable figures. Monuments seek to immortalize, Ryan seeks to embalm. Her sculptures function as memento mori—physical reminders that death and decay await us all. Ryan’s practice has often been compared to Dutch vanitas, Baroque-period still lifes of wilted flowers, dwindling hourglasses, rotting food and melted candlesticks symbolizing the futility of worldly desires. Yet, with her intentional materiality and gaze fixed almost exclusively on trifles and waste, Ryan adds a comment on the excess and refuse of consumerism, as well as their afterlife.

Heavy Heart, Show Pony and Sweet Nothings—three sculptures similar in size and similarly trite in title—are the sort of mementos of sentiment and taste that Ryan has come to be known for. Their sleek bodies and perfected curves act as simulacra, the foreground for emotional transference. The newly introduced collection sees Ryan scaling up the polystyrene rings you might have once admired in the supermarket bubblegum machine or the arcade prize cabinet to amplify their sentimental value.

Another series of sculptures with visceral resonance features cast-concrete peach slices with old engines as pits. Wild Heart embeds a Harley-Davidson engine in the smooth, heart-shaped body of a peach, though that peach is not entirely representational. As Ryan said, it is “more emoji than produce aisle,” yet it retains the charge of something familiar. Whether it’s the defunct Harley-Davidson engine—a symbol of American adventurism—or the tender skin of a peach rendered in cold concrete, the piece is baptized in its own contradictions. Yet, it holds together. In denying resolution, Ryan suspends her subjects in a constant state of waste and wanting.