CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
MAIN SPACE GALLERY
Dirty Picture
RYAN DANNY OWEN
EXHIBITION DATES:
June 28 - September 7, 2024
CLOSING RECEPTION:
Friday, August 30, 7 PM - 9 PM
RSVP for the closing reception is not required, but encouraged.
To RSVP, please follow this link.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:
Taking the form of the set of a fictional dirty picture, this exhibition recontextualizes various personal archives of pornography magazines and bootleg gay VHS tapes using experimental approaches to remove snippets of material, footage, and imagery. Imagined through a weathered blue billboard and the set of a dreamlike film, Dirty Picture delves into themes of fantasy, absence, personal narrative, gender and intergenerational queer identity.
Please be advised that this exhibition features adult content.
RYAN DANNY OWEN (they/him/her) is a non-binary visual artist, author, and queer historian based in Mohkinstsis, Treaty 7/Calgary, Alberta. Their work explores intergenerational queer identity, gender, loss, and sexuality through objects, the archive, automatic writing, and performance. They question the body through liminality, queer nostalgia, and the disassembling and recontextualizing of loaded material to explore fantasy, memory, and queer absence.
www.ryandannyowen.com
Ryan Danny Owen
Exhibition Text by August Klintberg
Inside a black suitcase coated in dust and grime, more than seventy, six-hour VHS tapes waited for the artist quietly in a basement. Contents: a mixture of televised movies and television shows – Alf (1986-1990), Silence of the Lambs (1991) – interspersed with found, 1980s and 90s gay porn in French and English, each short clip nestled secretively amid magnetic noise and the glitch of cuts created through in-VCR-editing.
Found moving and still images of this kind are foundational in Ryan Danny Owen’s practice, whether through altering gay magazine pornography by painstakingly erasing to make textual, decorative, and decorous line and pattern work, or creating an environment reminiscent of a soundstage or theatre set based on the blue bedrooms of so-called “blue films.” Erasure, transposition, and collage are central strategies for this artist, who has a special fondness for gay visual culture of the final two decades of the twentieth century.
Owen’s desire was to create a fictional space “fully activated and real,”1 brought to action by the presence of the viewer, called Blue Fantasy Motel. The colour and word “blue” have long association with the porn industry, as well as being artistic idée fixes: whether in the work of Yves Klein, or the cover designs of Fitzcarraldo Editions. Then there are queer uses of blue: Ellsworth Kelly’s blue, Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ ongoing use of powder and pale blues - his “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991), animated once a day by a performer wearing headphones, is especially resonant for Owen, as it shows “connection to queer spaces and was activated by the dancer’s body.”2 Like Owen’s hotel room, Gonzalez-Torres’ piece is equally a theatrical set, latent, waiting to be brought to action through viewers’ fantasies. Finally, there is the mood of “blue,” in all its plangent yearning and longing, which somehow seems perfectly attuned to queerness.
Many elements of décor and set dressing have been handcrafted by the artist: a key fob (an edition of 100); a do-not-disturb doorknob sign; a handmade denim jacket cut from cyanotype treated cloth; a felt cowboy hat covered in more than 8,000 rhinestones shaped out of a felt base, dyed with cyanotype. “My work is so involved in my bodily impact on objects and material,” they told me, explaining that handling and altering fabric, paper, and rhinestones alike allow them to confront their “dissociative relation to material.”3 Likewise, this exhibition’s materiality stridently insists the viewer confront their relation to any of the “blues” mentioned above.
Lurking in the rear of Owen’s exhibition is a photographically enlarged, reprinted found photo showing a muscled, naked body who gazes out at the viewer solicitously; exact location is evaded through a tangle of blue bedsheets and cloudy marks left by Owen’s eraser. Redaction here is a coquettish, flirty artistic gesture, but also evokes those men-who-have-sex-with-men lost to HIV/AIDS, the carceral system, and the opioid crisis among other tragedies. This sitter’s identity is a seeming mystery – to the artist and to (most) viewers, but to someone, likely several people, they were certainly beloved. Through fragmentation (or is it fission?), eros is discharged through each pigment-leaching move of the artist’s hand. Owen’s images in this series reposition the viewer as no mere erotic voyeur (the original intended use of the image), and instead recast us as awkwardly curious strangers, akin to a well-meaning but pedestrian visitor to the archive who had first felt nervous about just how long to linger on each page while thumbing beefcakes in the queer periodicals fond, who then finally felt a slow rush of relief realizing each picture, though existing in the past, is a person, regardless of whether the image is erased.
Owen’s exhibition suggests the intergenerational appetites of queer kinship described across a raft of sources: Jeremy Atherton Lin’s memoir Gay Bar (2021) describes the humid, erotic atmosphere and acts in queer spaces; Sarah Schulman’s ground breaking Gentrification of the Mind (2013), which morns the lapse in political-activist affinities across generations of queer and gay men from the 1990s to twenty-first century; or Feeling Backward (2009) by Heather Love, which proposes that some queer archival material asks – demands – not to be touched. Tangling the queer continuum of past, present, and future are, of course, Lee Edelman and José Esteban Muñoz, with the former insisting queerness is anti-relational, in No Future (2004), and the latter suggesting queerness is always on the horizon, in Cruising Utopia (2009). In relation to the quadrants articulated by these sources, the messy, productively incomplete accounting for nostalgia cum affinity formation is the territory that Owen’s work inhabits.
This mise-en-scène strategy associated with installation and conceptual art – the architectural environment constructed within the architecture of the gallery – is evident in the work of many artists: Renée Green, General Idea, Luis Jacob, NE Thing Co. Picking up on their aesthetic and conceptual cues, enclosed on two sides, Owen’s motel room can be entered, touched. Has someone slept on this bed yet? And where is everyone? A glance in the motel door peephole reveals a cardboard standee of 1980s “all-male movie” porn star Casey Donovan (1943-1987) wearing a jockstrap and cowboy gear – perhaps a nod to TRUCK’s situation on the prairie and the exhibition’s coincidence with the Calgary Stampede (1912-present). A tubular steel, spindle-backed chair, quasi-Memphis in its design, is nestled next to a cathode-ray monitor playing strictly categorized fragments of VHS gay porn (scenes with tents, scenes with blue sheets, all spliced together by sort). This scavenging tactic repeats throughout the exhibition: carpet, a mix of handmade and second-hand, deeply stained blue rug “sourced” online. The mind boggles at these stains. Even a stain that is additive serves as some form of erasure, by blotting out what was there before. Imagine the perverse fear and hope and dream: that queerness could be thought otherwise than a stain. Are you a dreamer, like me?
1 From a conversation with the artist, August 2, 2024.
2 From an email exchange with the artist, August 3, 2024.
3 Ibid.
AUGUST KLINTBERG (formerly Mark Clintberg) is an artist who works in the field of art history. He is represented by Pierre François Ouellette art contemporain in Montreal, and is an Associate Professor at the Alberta University of the Arts. His research has been published in Printing History (2023), the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada (2019), The Journal of Canadian Art History (2020), and The Journal of Curatorial Studies (2016).