Outsides: Annie Vought and Anthony Ryan
Adobe Books Backroom Gallery is pleased to present “Outsides” a two-person exhibition of work by San Francisco-based artists Anthony Ryan and Annie Vought.
March 6, 2015 – March 28, 2015 opening reception Friday March6, 2015 from 6PM – 9PM
“Outsides” shows new work from the two artists, who have been colleagues since 2009 and both have highly process-focused practices through which they explore the medium of paper.
The exhibition will feature new prints, drawings, cut works on paper, and woven works on paper from the two artists, who approach the medium with a steady, intensely physical attention.
“Outsides” is an arcane printer’s term for the top and bottom sheet of a ream that are usually damaged. The term alludes simultaneously to how Ryan uses castoffs of the printing process as his raw material, and how Vought’s subtractive process results in works that are in essence only the edges, or outsides of the paper.
Anthony Ryan’s works on paper often imitate the form and function of mechanical processes and their by-products. In this showing of new work, Ryan uses off-cuts and test patterns from the edges of product packaging and other printed matter as his raw material to fashion explorations of arrangement and pattern that share aesthetic similarities to op-art and color theory experiments while maintaining an earnest approach to craft. In addition to commercial printing processes, his work is largely comprised of forms, patterns and color palettes that Ryan observes from industrial agriculture, early childhood learning toys, package design, institutional architecture, thrift stores, as well as interstitial spaces in the built environment. The artist experiences his process as a journey to discovery; he considers different organizations, arrangements and recombinations formal elements as they arise organically until he has created a work that “uses process to coax meaning from material”. For this new body of work, he has been making relief prints based on test patterns that he composes by utilizing modular matrices.
Annie Vought is interested in the state of drawing in the digital age, and the tangible hand-drawn image in particular. With the help of digital image editing software like Photoshop, we can quickly create photo-realistic impressions, but Vought considers the handwritten document to have the inimitable quality of capturing an emotion. Using anywhere from 500 to 1000 blades to finish each of her pieces, Vought performs intricate surgeries on drawings or hand-written letters, removing the negative spaces between forms and words. With this repetitive, meticulous action of cutting away the paper, she becomes hyperfocused on the line, the author who made it, and her physical relationship to the mark in any given moment. Her process becomes an elaborate investigation into the strange properties of storytelling: the word choice and line work lead to a contemplation of both the limits of the hand of the composer, as well as the beauty the author is able to capture. Vought is keen to re-examine the scraps of our lives, and pay homage to the beauty and complexity of the handmade.