>>PREVIEW
RYAN SLUGGETT: ADVICE FROM LEFT TO RIGHT
Runs until January 2
Trepanier Baer Gallery
Ryan Sluggett’s work makes me wonder what I’ve been doing with my time. The artist’s latest exhibition comprises more than 20 drawings, prints, paintings and sculptures made using an equally lengthy list of materials, including oil paint, acrylic, enamel, alkyd, spray paint, charcoal, pencil, crayon, ink and gouache.
More impressive though, is the 25-year-old artist’s virtuosic skill in drawing upon a visual vocabulary of contemporary and art historical ideas and techniques. Picasso and Cubism are obvious influences, but Sluggett’s work is most definitely situated in the present day.
In Fake Lake (2006), a pair of legs with blue canvas shoes seems to be extending into the picture from somewhere outside the canvas, leading the viewer from their own space into the one Sluggett has created. This space is not a simple one, however. Sluggett breaks his figures and their surroundings into planes that layer and intersect, sliding against each other. He uses these planes to provide multiple impressions of the same situations, but he also slips in textures and images from other sources, like a multifaceted collage.
On the beach in the foreground of the painting, a middle-aged couple sits deep in conversation. Their faces, however, have morphed into those of two children – she with a ponytail and he in a red baseball cap. In the distance, a woman in a red bathing suit stands thigh deep in green water, gazing over the boards of a skating rink. On the other side, a red rowboat carves an arc across the surface of a frozen pond.
Sluggett’s work is based in the somewhat outmoded practice of drawing from life. The artist recently found a prime location for sketching – the Vancouver office where he went to renew his passport. "It was great," he says. "Everyone was sitting, staring up at the screen. I’m going to go back there!"
The images from that day, however, may take years to filter into his finished work. "I have to look at the drawings way later to see what’s good and what’s not." Sluggett finds the best drawings happen when he becomes an objective recorder of the world around him. "If I try to label people, if I decide this is a sad person, it becomes too contrived."
Advice from Left to Right contains drawings from years worth of sketchbooks. Sluggett photocopies the images, then cuts and pastes them to build his complex compositions. This stage of the process gives the artist a chance to contemplate his work from a quieter, more objective perspective. "Life is whipping past and you’re just trying to capture it. With life, you’re automatically, completely involved."
The contrast between these two sides of his practice is what drives the artist. With his final compositions, Sluggett says he is trying to "relive and re-engage" the energy of life outside the studio.
He is successful in this effort. The finished drawings and paintings contain a compelling mix of chaos and control – gestural charcoal marks are combined with thick, juicy brushstrokes and fluid washes of ink. Not all these textures and colours become muddled though. Visceral and physical, the figures are in constant movement.
With his sculptures, Sluggett has set himself new challenges. He attempts to approach ceramic and wood with the same playfulness as his drawings and paintings, but the result does not flow with the same ease. The ceramic figures are heavy, the material incapable of incorporating the same layers of fleeting impressions that make his 3D work so dynamic.
Sluggett has enormous talent with materials though, and begins to resolve these difficulties by incorporating paper silhouettes into the figures, as well as layers of wood painted with pattern and texture.
Ryan Sluggett’s work is not only sophisticated technically and conceptually, but emotionally as well. People are packed into each of his pieces, but they are not reduced to clichéd characters. Skilfully combining materials, shading, colours and textures, each body is layered, flawed and complex. Together, they form narratives that transcend simple representation. |
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