Press Release
Ryan McNamara’s project, Still, is an invitation to expand the context of the gallery exhibition through performance and artistic production.
The project exists in three forms: spontaneous performances with visitors, the artist, and his collaborator, Sam Roeck, in the gallery for three weeks; photographic documentation of these performances made public as an open archive facilitated by the gallery’s online platform, e-mail, and social media; and resulting artworks made by applying the printed photographs to backdrops and props using the technique of decoupage.
Still questions the nature of a public in a way that reinvigorates the possibilities for performance in an institutional environment. By linking the documentation of this process to virtual, informal communication, performance is unexpectedly incorporated rather than moderated along with the well-known limitations of conventional documentation and reception. Various negations are employed to redraw lines between past, present, and future creating a space of encounter that resonates long after its occurrence.
Between February 25 and March 17, Ryan involved over 1,000 visitors as participants in individual and collective performance. Working from a situationist methodology, but also, wholesale from a handbook of performance art history, Ryan created photographic images that displaced the performative act from himself to his collaborators. Arguably, he has transformed this enabling activity into a practice unto itself. By entering the gallery, one agrees to perform and be photographed. By negating the visitor, who naturally feels like a spectator upon entering the gallery space, theater and a primary audience were eliminated.
In the second phase of Still (March 20-April 14), Ryan’s decoupaged objects become fully transformed into artworks with their own agency and identity in the space. Culled from an accumulation of the performance stills, the images are resized onto colored grounds and decoupaged onto backdrops and props. The backdrops, hovering just above the floor’s surface, narrate and emphasize actions and characters of the performances. From a distance, the intricate overlay of content appears as pictorial abstraction.
Certain relics remain. Ryan’s uniform worn every day for the project, leggings and a sweatshirt stiffened and decoupaged, hangs on a rack in the corner as a reminder of the activity that took place. An uneven chair activates the floor and a column hangs chained from the ceiling. Against the dynamic scale of the wall works, the sculptures collectively take over the gallery’s center in an overall choregraphed mass. They carry with them the labor of a performance and collectively become a tableau of the process: existing as the cycle of reference, selection, use, material transformation, reference again, selection again, and, finally, a realized duration of time and a production aptly titled, Still, which will continue, migrate and evolve.
Ryan McNamara has enthusiastically and intentionally pursued temporary and collaborative projects as diverse as biennial exhibitions, museum benefits, and one-night performances in a variety of public and private spaces resulting in a truly fluid practice that intertwines the art community, social networks and technology. Exhibitions and performances include: Greater New York, MoMA PS1, 2010 Athens Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kitchen, The Artist’s Institute, Performa 09 at X Initiative, and MoMA, New York.