One of Britain’s most prolific artists, Ryan Gander is known for creating playful, engaging works in a range of mediums, from installation, sculptures and photographs to performative lectures, publications, inventions and interventions.
Through associative thought processes that connect the everyday and the esoteric, the overlooked and the commonplace, Gander’s works involve a questioning of language and knowledge, and a reinvention of the modes of appearance and creation of an artwork.
His work can be reminiscent of a puzzle, a network with multiple connections, the fragments of an embedded story or a huge set of hidden clues to be deciphered. Through these means Gander encourages viewers to make their own connections and invent their own narrative in order to solve the charade staged by the artist in his work.
Read Only, curated by ACCA’s Artistic Director Juliana Engberg and Associate Curator Hannah Mathews, will bring together video, installation and mixed-media works from Gander’s more recent works. A highlight is the acclaimed Ampersand (2012) comprising of 66 everyday items and works from the artist’s collection, presented on a conveyor belt set on a continuous cycle behind a wall in the gallery.
The exhibition will also include works from the 2013 series Pushed into a corner by the logic of my own making along with Two hundred and sixty seven degrees below every kind of zero, 2014 (a life size replica of a helium balloon that appears to float against the ceiling of the gallery) and Porthole to Culturefield Revisited, 2010 (a porthole and ladder rungs positioned high up in the gallery, out of reach of the spectator).
Ryan Gander was born in 1976 in Chester, England and lives and works between London and Suffolk. He has won numerous prizes including the Zurich Art Prize (2009), the ABN Amro Art Prize (2006) and the Baloise Art Statements of the Art Basel (2006).
He was included in Documenta 13 in 2012 and in the 2011 Venice Biennale, and has had recent solo shows at institutions including the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Singapore (2015), Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City (2015), Manchester Art Gallery (2014), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2012), and the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010).
“Ryan is one of the most agile of artists. Conceptual, poetic, funny, and darkly wry, his works provoke the audience to reconsider their relationship to objects and ideas,” says Juliana Engberg. “Often, by causing his works to be stuck, blocked, elusive or hidden, Ryan repositions the viewer in an absurd way that keeps them in a loop of quizzical uncertainty.”
Ryan Gander: Read Only
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank
Exhibition continues to 2 August 2015
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.accaonline.org.au for details.
Image: Ryan Gander, Ampersand 2012. © Ryan Gander, Courtesy the artist and Ishikawa Collection, Okayama – photo by André Morin.