Everyday Icons

Everyday Icons – a solo show by Ryan Malley
Opening Night Reception: Saturday, October 8th (6-10PM)
On View: October 6th – October 29th, 2016

Mighty Box Gallery is pleased to present “Everyday Icons”, the debut solo exhibition by San Francisco based artist Ryan Malley. A collection of new oil paintings primarily centered around his life-size moving painting “Icon Cycle: Market Street”, Malley’s figurative work aims to have the viewer re-examine the people that exist within one’s daily cycle.

Ryan Malley’s oil paintings range from photo-real to abstract representations of everyday people, their possessions and surroundings. His process starts with candid photography of his subjects. He likens this method to a biologist collecting specimens for research. Utilizing Photoshop, the artist curates a selection of subjects, each representing a specific archetype and arranges them within the same virtual space.The subjects in his work, although seeming to co-exist, may have actually been photographed on a different day or separate location. The painting of each character can take from 15 to 40 hours and during this time the connection is made between artist and subject. They become more than strangers. In the artist’s words, “Although I may never meet these people I feel connected to them. Having spent so much time with them, examining them, wondering who they are, they become part of me.”

Malley’s current body of work was created as a reaction to the post-internet world in which people digest media at a ravenous pace. He seeks to engage the viewer for an extended amount of time, asking them to empathize with the person that stands before them. He comments, “I want people to look at the work for longer than 30 seconds. I thought that perhaps the way to achieve this goal was to make it life-size and have the canvas constantly moving to hold the viewer’s attention.”

The idea for the Cycle series came to him while researching work by tattooist and oil painter, Henry Lewis for a different project. He stumbled upon another Henry Lewis who lived from 1819-1904. Lewis was one of the leading artists of his time and specialized in moving panoramic paintings. In the mid-nineteenth century, moving panoramic paintings were among the most popular forms of entertainment in the world. These works would depict such things as the coronation of a king at a life-size scale and would tour the countryside for years at a time. Spectators would pay a small fee to watch while a narrator described the scene on view. Examples of these paintings are now very rare as the art form fell into obscurity due to the advent of cinema.

The discovery of this art form inspired him to bridge the mental gap between two different concepts he wanted to combine: the idea of the cycles/routines people perform as a part of their daily life represented as a visual loop and the ability to engage the viewer’s gaze for an extended amount of time.

Malley is fascinated with representational art and its ability to mimic, but never truly be, reality. He notes, “It is always the concept of the person, symbol, or object. The idea of a face, the crease in a shirt – all of these things as well as their surroundings are never truly that thing but rather a representation of it. Does a pair of shoes hold more or less importance than a human face in our visual experience? In the optic bombardment that is our every day, what is remembered as noteworthy and what is marked down as forgettable?” Using brush work, detail, and color, Malley attempts to draw our focus to what he sees as the visual curation of a daily experience.

What: Ryan Malley’s “Everyday Icons”

When: October 6th-29th. Opening reception October 8th, 6-10pm

Where: Mighty Box Gallery. 245 S Van Ness Ave #201, San Francisco, CA 94103