RYAN GANDER: CHAMPIONED BY RIGOUR: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is very pleased to present Championed by rigour, an exhibition of new work by Ryan Gander, and the artist's first solo show with the gallery.
Focusing his critical and investigative eye on the minutiae of contemporary life, Gander uses everyday experience and collective consciousness as the substance of his often self-reflexive projects and artworks. Employing a broad range of processes and media, the artist simultaneously draws attention to the fault lines between communication and interpretation, between the object and its given context, and between the artist and their audience. Gander’s works investigate political models, social systems, modernist theory and the verbal and visual semiotics that give form to contemporary society. Imbued with a fundamental conceptual rigor, Gander suggests that his works’ starkly formal appearance, or ‘face’, is only secondary to a more enigmatic, substantive, yet elusive, content, one the artist might dub the artwork’s ‘soul’.
Among the several dynamic works of sculpture, photography, works on paper and installations featured, (the title of this work is written as a musical score) is a key example of the complex relationship between form and content that informs Ganders’ practice. First appearing as a randomly discarded, perhaps Minimalist, grouping of brass tubes, the arrangement actually carries with it a specific narrative. Each length of brass is tuned to a note from a section of the classical music composition, Gran Vals, known more widely as the mobile telephone company Nokia’s first default ring-tone. Once elevated to the most widely distributed and recognized tone in the world, the momentary supremacy of this simple arrangement is now nearly forgotten as Nokia’s pre-eminence has passed and more sophisticated ring-tone technology has developed. The work represents this passing with a discarded arrangement of bells loaded with the potential of the tune. In fact, Gander has arranged the tubes to allude to a fantastical scenario where the melody may have actually played had they fallen together in just the right order before being settling in silence.
All installation images above: Photo by Chris Burke