at Briggs Robinson
Gallery

Waterwall, Roselyn, 2004,
cast and polished aluminum,
42 x 48 in.

Natural forms predominate in Gregory Ryan's "Sculptures 2005" installation. Through abstraction, transformative materials and rescaling one begins to see similarities among Ryan's subjects; the topographies of planetary surfaces, leaves, trickling liquids and elephant skins. Such similarities are evocative of the Fibonacci sequence, golden section and fractals that describe micro and macro commonalities found in nature; including the DNA double helix, population growth, and our galaxy's shape.

Ryan's "Landscapes" show sections of the earth's surface greatly scaled down from satellite data. Chaux-de-Fonds Topography, Switzerland (2004), for example, shows a scale of 1 to 100,000. Ryan enters these measurements into modeling software and gives three-dimensional expression to each value. The results are strikingly detailed metal topographic maps that even with the omission of ecologies, climate and patches of water reveal verisimilar ridges and valleys.

Ryan's works confound the nature of indexical representation. The landscapes are derived from satellite measurements that are radar samples of ranges collected into a digital database. Ryan enters this data into software to achieve a digital 3D model. This data is input to a computer numeric controlled (CNC) milling machine that carves a negative form that is then used to cast the final metal works. Despite all of this mediation the end results read as 3D photographs. All the works in this installation similarly have mimetic patterns and details though they are achieved through very different mediations.

"Water Walls" (2003-04) are derived from algorithms--mathematical models of the behavior of liquids in wind. The idea of "casting" liquid water is compelling especially as Ryan makes works that seem to have a nearly photographic specificity, though these waters never existed. These algorithms are again expressed in three-dimensional digital sculpting software. CNC foam is cut using this data, and Ryan then casts the works in aluminum, which is finished to achieve reflections that, like those of water, shift with the viewer's perspective.

The "Elephant Skin" and "Leaf" works are created though the "analog" process of taking direct latex impressions from African elephant skins and rainforest plants, making molds from these impressions and then casting bronze from the molds. Though the mediation seems less complex (and perhaps more "honest") than the Land and Seascapes, the resulting pieces are equally verisimilar and abstract. While they retain detailed topographies, the color, reflectivity and other material qualities of the skins and leaves (like the landscapes) are neutralized in the bronze.

Ryan often presents many of the above subjects on a single surface plane situated atop large cast metal slabs with smoothed sides. This presentation makes one focus on the haptic facades. For instance, the impressions of Leaf Cube (2004), Elephant Skin, Kenyata, Samburu Reserve, Kenya (2004) and Land Wedge, Alpes-Maritime, (2003) are easily compared--their abstract forms yield more similarities than differences.

There is a sense of delight and wonder in discovering that what one takes for a landscape is actually the surface of a leaf. Such moments of discovery reveal Ryan's achievement--his works are realizations of universal forms derived from journeys both physical and metaphysical from Paris, to African jungles and savannahs and along satellites' lonely orbits.

William V. Ganis

Gregory Ryan Sculptures 2005 is on view at Briggs Robinson Gallery from
February 3 - March 5, 2005.