Ethan Ryman

Ethan Ryman’s exploration of his idiosyncratic idiom that lies in-between the functions of photography and sculpture is distinctly unique in that he is neither a photographer nor a sculptor. Yet, in his particular and singular pursuit in both practices Ryman appears to be singularly particular. For a good decade, ever since Ryman closed his long chapter as a music producer in 2007, he’s undertaken his new career as a self-taught artist to employ photography as means to examine new spatial possibilities upon which the intersections of carefully composed architectural motifs, including façades, sides, rooftops, cornices, finials, among other features of buildings in varieties of angles can be explored while simultaneously expanding the dynamism of abstract geometry and the subtlety of texture. I should mention Ryman’s concept of objecthood began in mounting his images on aluminum from the outset while displaying them as antiparallel to the walls. Then leading to his last one-person exhibit, The Band: An Installation of Obstructivist Construction and Related Photo-Sculptural Objects at 524 Projects in 2017, Ryman’s attraction to sculpture and photography in their respective domains was fully revealed: five constructed boxes in their assertive rectilinear configurations, for each is placed on a pedestal along with five photographs, mounted on relatively thick wooden frames, which had taken from them. Whatever references one may relate Ryman’s work to among early modernist painting, especially purism or precisionism, both of which preferred formal designs of geometrical plans in respect to urban life and technology as cool, impersonal procreation as seen in the paintings of say Charles Sheeler and Ralston Crawford in particular, one is taken at once by how Ryman has continued to evolve in furthering his experiment with form as a potential synthesis of two and three-dimension and the uses of materials.