The Green Gallery is pleased to host Ryan Peter, It only works if everyone believes it does. This showcase of unique large-scale photograms of the recent past will be the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. Peter’s painterly innovation of the photogram process explores conditions of media and representations of the unconscious.
Peter’s prints feel digital and of the present, running counter to what is invoked via this intensive, handmade process of the darkroom. The works are generated via layering various plastic films (negatives). These films are often painted or manipulated in some way by a spray application. Compositions are formed front to back through timed out intervals. Peter also makes use of dodging and burning techniques to generate artificial shadows and gradients found within and in between forms. The result is an image that at first glance appears to be a Photoshop collage, but upon closer inspection reveals a rewarding material mystery not of the computer.
There is a duality in Peter’s work that opens up a space for reflection about our relationship to the digital as well as painting and drawing. Forms within his compositions carry the weight of a painted stroke disguised behind the flatness of photographic paper. Drawn marks hold immediacy and tactility behind the slick veneer of these glossy surfaces. Where in Photoshop these gestures act as effect; in Peter’s work they become more of a trace, albeit from projected light. The material presence of these works helps us think through the various filters information passes through before arriving on the screen space of our present.
Within these photograms we find a shallow space where forms are staged as abstractions alluding to bodies and/or landscapes. For Peter, these decisions come byway of an automatic process; one that is tied both from the hand to mind but also the mind to the digital. In this way, tendencies of the personal as well as the collective fuse to generate works that feel both recognizable but also ghostly. As speckles of light pass through Peter’s fabricated negatives, reverberations of material presence and mental wandering allow for an openness of experience.
Ryan Peter, It only works if everyone believes it does, opens Friday, July 26th during gallery hours. We invite you to join us for a reception on Saturday, July 27th from 5-7pm.