{"id":20454,"date":"2026-01-21T16:29:41","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T16:29:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/21\/artist-kathleen-ryans-beautiful-blight\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T16:29:43","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T16:29:43","slug":"artist-kathleen-ryans-beautiful-blight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/21\/artist-kathleen-ryans-beautiful-blight\/","title":{"rendered":"Artist Kathleen Ryan\u2019s Beautiful Blight"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Starstruck<\/em> is at once a toast burned to a crisp and a nocturne mosaic. Courtesy of the artist and Karma, artwork photography by Lance Brewer<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One man\u2019s trash is another man\u2019s treasure, and your spoiled lunch is artist Kathleen Ryan<\/a>\u2019s next masterpiece. Her sculptures\u2014both arrestingly brilliant and blighted\u2014impart a transmissible thrill found not in denying the logic of mortality or memory, but in exposing their underbelly. Observe the binned raspberry whose mold-spore matrices are made effervescent under Ryan\u2019s meticulous hand. A halved peach with a Harley Davidson engine for a pit. A toy ring\u2014one a child might beg for, receive and discard in the same weekend\u2014rendered as a votive statue, too heavy to hold and, like so many of her works, too bewitching to forget.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Ryan\u2019s recently closed exhibition at Karma Los Angeles, \u201cSouvenir,\u201d unveiled nine sculptures and, with them, a referendum on the decadent and the grotesque. In the first room of the show, two shimmering slices of oversized bread, Starstruck<\/i> and Sunset Strip<\/i>, leaned up against separate walls like props in a cabaret. Starstruck<\/i> is at once a cremated slice of toast and an unspooled geode. A golden crumb\u2014rendered in quilt-patterned tufts of jasper, amber and tiger\u2019s eye beads\u2014is banked alongside pools of obsidian and lava rock that ebb and flow in interchanging spirals and starbursts. Sunset Strip<\/i>, pinkish and rotting, boasts a campaign of gray and purple smears that echo cumulus clouds coasting along a dusky sky.<\/p>\n

\u201cBad Fruits,\u201d a corpus of gem-encrusted fruits frozen in various phases of decay, is perhaps Ryan\u2019s most well-known series, but it is only one variation on a frequently revisited theme. She often mines everyday ephemera for inspiration and subject matter: hot rods, motorcycles, citrus and disposable kitsch. Her practice is Pop, yet she\u2019s more partial to the unseemly, ubiquitous parts of modern life than its fashions and novelties. For Ryan, ironically, art is all about the rust, and not the diamonds.<\/p>\n

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In Dreamhouse<\/em>, the fresh fruit is made of synthetic beads, while the rot is composed of semiprecious stones. Courtesy of the artist and Karma, artwork photography by Lance Brewer<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ryan\u2019s sculptures inspire awe as easily as they do disgust. In fact, they seize upon this dynamic with vigor, reconstituting what is beautiful and what is abject. The rot is as much an ornate program as it is a patch of Penicillium. Dreamhouse<\/i>\u2014a moldering majesty the size of a garden shed\u2014is a testament to this fact. A bramble appears in clusters of vibrant scarlet drupelets, lapped up in fissures of jade, azure, seafoam and lilac manifestations of mold. The center of the raspberry opens onto a grotto of opalescent quartz stalactites and ridges of amethyst. Ryan often reserves semiprecious stones for the rotten bits, most of them applied with their imperfect, incongruent edges intact.<\/p>\n

In scale and magnanimity alone, Ryan\u2019s sculptures are commensurate with public monuments, but they almost always serve an opposite function from statues dedicated to venerable figures. Monuments seek to immortalize, Ryan seeks to embalm. Her sculptures function as memento mori\u2014physical reminders that death and decay await us all. Ryan\u2019s practice has often been compared to Dutch vanitas, Baroque-period still lifes of wilted flowers, dwindling hourglasses, rotting food and melted candlesticks symbolizing the futility of worldly desires. Yet, with her intentional materiality and gaze fixed almost exclusively on trifles and waste, Ryan adds a comment on the excess and refuse of consumerism, as well as their afterlife.<\/p>\n

Heavy Heart<\/i>, Show Pony<\/i> and Sweet Nothings<\/i>\u2014three sculptures similar in size and similarly trite in title\u2014are the sort of mementos of sentiment and taste that Ryan has come to be known for. Their sleek bodies and perfected curves act as simulacra, the foreground for emotional transference. The newly introduced collection sees Ryan scaling up the polystyrene rings you might have once admired in the supermarket bubblegum machine or the arcade prize cabinet to amplify their sentimental value.<\/p>\n

Another series of sculptures with visceral resonance features cast-concrete peach slices with old engines as pits. Wild Heart<\/i> embeds a Harley-Davidson engine in the smooth, heart-shaped body of a peach, though that peach is not entirely representational. As Ryan said, it is \u201cmore emoji than produce aisle,\u201d yet it retains the charge of something familiar. Whether it\u2019s the defunct Harley-Davidson engine\u2014a symbol of American adventurism\u2014or the tender skin of a peach rendered in cold concrete, the piece is baptized in its own contradictions. Yet, it holds together. In denying resolution, Ryan suspends her subjects in a constant state of waste and wanting.<\/p>\n

\"Concrete,\"Concrete,
Wild Heart<\/em> holds echoes of both the peach and the organ. Courtesy of the artist and Karma, artwork photography by Lance Brewer<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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