Land Portrait (Coordinated and Curated by Brian Jobe.)
January 5- January 27, 2012_ UTSA Satellite Space, Blue Star Art Complex, San Antonio, TX
July 6-28, 2012_ Downtown Gallery, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN

Land Portrait will feature work from Culture Lab members based upon his or her relationship with a particular place, landform, landscape, topography, or state of current residence. The works, when combined, will act as comprehensive land portraits. These translations of site are needed as societies are continually in flux and locations are fluid. Histories are waiting to be formed.

for images and more information please visit the Culture Laboratory website. 

PRESS:
 Review: “Earth isn’t always what we try to make of it” by Scott Andrews, SAN ANTONIO CURRENT, Jan. 11 2012

 Review: “Exhibit Focuses on Landscape” by Elda Silva, MySanAntonio.com, Jan 17, 2012

RYDER’s contributions:

Marking Time: Erosion
2×4, acrylic, gold leaf, sanding block, 13 hours of repetitive force _ 3.5″ x 72″x 2″

Marking Time: Compression
2×4, acrylic, gold leaf, hammer, 7 minutes of repetitive force_ 3.5″x48″x2″

Concerned with deep-time versus human-time, these pieces use common building materials to comment on value and longevity. By collapsing the actions of millenia into a language of countable hours and manual labor the objects use the language (and approximate the methods) of geologic time as a reminder of human time scales.

Oddly, spending 13 hours hand-sanding through a 2×4 was not exhilarating. Crushing two 2×4’s with a golden hammer (while on stilts) was kind of fun. Destroying the building material of choice for mass expansion homes -as well as a harvested and manufactured natural resource- reflects my belief that the decision to create is intrinsically destructive. For most humans once they are occupied creating the task must be completed, leading to a near-blind subservience to idea and object… post-haste.

The speed with which modern growth (primarily mechanical) is enacted has become humanity’s enemy: exponentially consuming resources while rendering traditional manual labor obsolete. On one hand, the individual is devalued due to the speed/strength of the body (his/her natural time keeping device is declared worthless, therefore human based time is worthless*), and on the other hand, we increasingly neglect ecological and geological time for the sake of rapid completion/expansion/creation. This leaves us organically timeless, fixated on the mechanical, electronic rapidity of the future… probably without bodies or a planet.

~Ryder 2012
* this is a massive leap in logic and probably isn’t true, but it is an interesting idea.

VIDEO of EROSION (time lapse… naturally)

VIDEO of COMPRESSION (real time… naturally)

GALLERY

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