Artist Talk:
January 20th, 2024 
4-6 pm 
Cordy Ryman with Susan Harris and Phong H. Bui

Please join us for a spirited conversation  conversation between Cordy Ryman, Susan Harris, writer and curator, and Phong H. Bui, publisher and artistic director of the Brooklyn Rail.
 

Freight + Volume presents Monkey Mind Symphony, an exhibition of recent works by Cordy Ryman. Monkey Mind Symphony will open November 17th, and run through December 22nd, 2023. This is Ryman’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Cordy Ryman’s Monkey Mind Symphony is at once a free-flowing refuge, and primal documentation of the creative act. Throughout Ryman’s work, the process of making art, which in his case involves a self-legislating, curatorial process applied to recurring visual motifs, becomes self-reflexive, consciously responding to the dimensions of a particular site. Poised between genres, between formalism and abstraction, painting and sculpture, Ryman’s recent works have an angularity about them that serves to highlight all the more meticulously the themes, formations, and patterns he has been developing over the past several years.

This process-bound practice explores space as both a container and a continuum. Using a workman-like mathematical precision as a substrate, Ryman creates not so much narratives as ever newly conjoined relationships. His Accent Cloud Constellation, for example, seems to radiate the dynamism of a mobile, while being materially and functionally inert. Within this illusive suggestion of movement, however, a sense of pathos cuts across the visual elements that compose the work: circles, spirals, constellated eastings and northings. 

As communication is a multi-layered, multi-storied experience, Ryman’s works can be “read” as grappling with the myriad wellsprings of the creative act. The recurrence of archetypal motifs, which seem to echo the cosmic consciousness of prehistoric cave drawings, have the painterly aura of contemporary minimalism. Throughout Monkey Mind Symphony, Ryman foregrounds a process of selection, not unlike self-curation, which lends these motifs a more or less greater independence from the artist's hand. Taken as a whole, or in parts, the mosaic-like, organic forms he assembles present like sentient entities filled with a furtive animation.

Ryman’s series of boxes, which take many of his longstanding visual motifs and make them extend outwards toward the viewer, underscore a newfound state of contemplative immersion. Adding a sort of z-axis that reaches toward the viewer, these boxes, gathered once again into curated constellations that resonate with their facture, form the continuation of an ongoing process already delineated by motifs apparent in Ryman’s other work. They spiritualize stages of development in terms of steps which can be reached for and grasped. However instrumental, or subtle these manifestations of growth might appear, they allow the artist to engage in an ongoing process of free-association—essentially freezing his constellations, which still emanate an air of mystery, as they adhere to their place on a wall, as though the patterns they composed could change before your eyes.