Kathleen Ryan, “Spotlight”
by DeWitt Cheng
Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, California
Exhibition continues through February 23, 2025
December 14, 2024
“Bad Lemon (Celestial),” 2023, prehnite, aventurine, magnesite, amazonite, agate, jasper, quartz, labradorite, turquoise, ruby in zoisite, amethyst, citrine, serpentine, mother of pearl shell, freshwater pearl, onyx marble, glass, steel pins on coated polystyrene, 11 x 26 1/2 x 16 1/2”. Photo: Nicholas Lea Bruno. Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco.
The Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco recently moved from its Dogpatch warehouse location to higher profile digs in San Francisco’s business district, thanks to a two-year agreement with Vornado Realty Trust (nothing to do with the high-tech circulating fans, unfortunately). It now occupies the bottom two floors in the building formerly known as The Cube, an eye-catching high-modernist class blockhouse originally designed in 1971 as the corporate headquarters of Bank of America.
Among the three separate exhibitions inaugurating the new location is one featuring three sculptures, all dated 2023, by Kathleen Ryan, a California-born and -educated sculptor now living in New Jersey. Known for her enlarged and intricately decorated, bejeweled depictions of fruit ready for the compost bin, Ryan gets us to read each corrupted still life as a metaphor for the rotten state of political culture, or toxic capitalism, or any number of institutions or creeds past their use-by dates. Ryan’s amazing use of both cheap and precious materials transposes the disgustingly inedible into the incredibly alluring. As images they transcend whatever message or critique we choose to assign them.
“Bad Lemon (Desert),” 2023, citrine, jasper, agate, smoky quartz, carnelian, calcite, labradorite, amber, sunstone, garnet, unakite, red aventurine, tiger’s eye, tournaline, hessonite garnet, chrysoprase, lodolite, lepidolite, serpentine, shell, freshwater pearl, glass, steel pins on coated polystyrene,16 1/2 x 17 x 14”. Photo: Nicholas Lea Bruno. Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco.
“Bad Lemon (Celestial) and “Bad Lemon (Desert)” are each about the size of a watermelon, and both are displayed on pedestals. The former depicts an intact lemon with its yellow skin disappearing beneath blossoms of mold, like a planet covered by storms or turbulent gases — hence, celestial. Ryan used real fruits as models, observing the creeping decay. She fixes this with an armamentarium of materials both prosaic (the glass and plastic beads from hobbyist kits of yore for the yellow peel) and exotic (agate, amazonite, jasper, quartz, turquoise, amethyst, mother-of-pearl, onyx, marble, and citrine, among other minerals) for the blooms of rot. All the beads are affixed to the coated polystyrene core with steel pins. Examine the surface closely, and the visual opulence overwhelms; stand back and take in the whole, and the precious becomes, well, semiprecious or worse.
“Bad Lemon (Desert)” is a half-lemon, sectioned with its eight segments exposed, the integuments suggesting flower petals reversed, from convex to concave, with the juice evaporated. It also suggests a bisected pepper, albeit one covered with black mold, made from a similar variety of stones and shells.
A larger sculpture, “Screwdriver,” sits on the floor along the north museum wall, replicating in gigantic Oldenburgian scale a fruit garnish from the familiar highball. A maraschino cherry crowns a wedge of orange, all covered with Ryan’s intricacies of beads and stone, transfixed by an umbrella. Its segments are cut from a salvaged auto part, the trunk from a 1960s AMC Javelin, and stenciled with floral motifs that have been reassembled. The ensemble is monumental in scale, brandishing ingenuity and grotesquerie and even retaining a modicum of happy-hour festivity.
Kathleen Ryan, “Screwdriver,” 2023, onyx, citrine, rhodonite, garnet, agate, tektite, lava rock, turquoise, aquamarine, serpentine, magnesite, amazonite, black tourmaline, jasper, prehnite, ruby in zoisite, marble, amber, labradorite, smoky quartz, quartz, acrylic, steel pins on coated polystyrene, aluminum umbrella, 68’ AMC Javelin trunk, 77 x 88 x 107”. Courtesy of François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles.
Ryan’s gem-encrusted fruits and artifacts balance stunning visual appeal with the squeamish feelings that mold and rot elicit. They are contemporary versions of the vanitas and memento mori iconography of the Baroque era, in which objects such as flowers, fruits, candlesticks, soap bubbles, hourglasses, and human skulls remind us that sensual earthly joys are fleeting in the cosmic context of eternity. “All the work has something to do with mortality,” Ryan notes, conceding the link to tradition.
If the contemporary viewership no longer worries about individual salvation, we should still be concerned that the rapid growth of wasteful global consumerism is not sustainable. Ryan’s sculptures are ironic reminders that mineralized dematerializing fruit memorably suggests that nothing is permanent (with the possible aesthetic exception of this very kind of art). Hieronymus Bosch’s famed medieval triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights” features supersized fruit; in sixteenth-century Reformation Spain the painting was nicknamed Las Fresas — The Strawberries.
