Ryan Hogan and Jaime Raybin are material-driven installation artists working with ambiguous specimen-like forms. Because of similarities in their work, the artists decided to show together. Their exhibition “Suspension” fuses art and biology, and features exclusively self-illuminating work.
Ryan Hogan Statement
The series of dialectics including control and freedom, order and chaos, and transparency and opacity characterizes my body of work. Rather than being polarized among these relationships, the process poises itself between these binaries. As the contemporary philosopher, Mark Taylor, asserts, it is at this liminal space where complexity resides.
Jaime Raybin Statement
My work is a private look at the connection between mind and body. Using the microscope as a tool for abstraction, my PSA-style lightbox displays juxtapose ambiguous anatomical imagery against captions connected to internal dialog. The piece “Clot” shows a hairy jelly-like mass alongside a caption reading “There is a specific form of perfectionism where you can’t make decisions, can’t commit to anything, for fear of being wrong.” The language of the text falls somewhere between diary and textbook: a researcher inadvertently revealing too much about herself. The displays are simultaneously confrontational and abstract, the viewer accidentally overhearing both sides of a passing conversation between body and mind.
An overall objective is to create forms, not represent them. It can be contested that the forms are reminiscent, biological or laboratory like in nature. The reason is that anything completely beyond familiarity would be entirely other. The work would then be metaphorically opaque which would contradict the visual and ideological nature of the work. To remain on that liminal space between extremes, in order to maintain translucency, the work runs up to the edge of a recognizable, yet recondite, sign system. It then careens off of that sign system to bring the viewer to a new point of reference. The forms become seminal bodies from which others can spring board off of, thereby reaching even newer reference points.
Through the creation of these non-representation, context free, closed systems, the desire is to produce a visceral experience for both the viewer and artist. Rather than creating confrontational representations, the work sheds symbolic baggage in an attempt to transcend banality, but not at the expense of disrupting the senses.
Nashville Scene, Feb 24 2010
Ryan Hogan
Distinguo primitus