Ryan Featured in Four-Person Mount Airy Exhibition

By Purnell T. Cropper | June 29, 2010

Abbey Ryan ’03, an alum and an Adjunct Professor of Art, was featured in a four-person exhibition titled Affinity in June at the Mount Airy Contemporary Artists Space in Philadelphia.

“Artist couples often share ties that resonate deeply in their professional practice as well as their personal lives,” says the Mount Airy Contemporary Artists Space website. “This exhibition explores the work of four artists and the way their work is intertwined. Hillerbrand+Magsamen are a Texas-based collaborative team that use video and installation to explore concepts of interpersonal space, memory and family dynamic. Abbey Ryan and Jury Smith are Philadelphia-based artists who share a fascination with process and layering, expressed in very different mediums.

“Drawing from her ‘A Painting a Day’ still life project as groundwork, Abbey Ryan has been developing a body of work that explores the conceptual and visual relationship between figure and ground, contour and space. Working with ink, she chooses shapes that, to her, are reminiscent of a spiritual icon. The shapes are repeated and averaged; often, this distillation makes the shapes not visually distinct enough to define. Each layer of washed ink is the same value and color. The multiple contours and value variations are the result of shifting layers of the image; akin to the phenomenon of studying a still life object until it glows out of focus.” Read more at www.mountairycontemporary.com.

Ryan’s work has been written about in dozens of print and web publications, including Seth Godin’s most recent bestseller, Linchpin, and posts about her “A Painting a Day” project on BoingBoing. In conjunction with her Painting a Day project, her work is in hundreds of private and public collections all over the world.