56 Henry is pleased to present Capsule, an immersive installation, including the first bronze sculpture made by Ryan Wallace. A new monograph has been published by Land and Sea for the occasion.
Wallace's output is a cycle of continuously constructed, razed, rebuilt, and re-flattened information. Like a tomb of fossils, the gallery is an optical vista of times that both support and trap the materials employed in his paintings and sculptures. All of his work evolves from both the act of making and those materials that have been cast off, removed, and redacted from previous works. Like a scavenger in an ecosystem, Wallace continually churns what is at hand in the studio, as the waste of one system becomes the structure of another. Originally employed as molds for concrete and plaster sculptures, the square tiles which encase the gallery have previously been included in floor installations, shattered and stuffed inside other sculptures, and inlaid into painting surfaces. For the bronze work, Capsule, the five sides of a mold have been set aside, used to create a plaster investment, and burned out, destroyed to make way for molten bronze. This act brings a finality to their previous state of accumulation and reincarnation, leaving a marker of time which can no longer be broken open or unraveled.
Ryan Wallace (b. 1977, New York, USA) is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant awardee and an Elizabeth Foundation of the Arts' Robert Blackburn Printing Workshop SIP Fellow. Recent solo exhibitions have been with Susan Inglett Gallery, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco; and Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles. Wallace has been included in group exhibitions at BAM, Brooklyn; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Pima Air and Space Museum, Tucson; Islip Art Museum, Islip; Gerhard Hofland Gallery, Amsterdam; Boeske & Holland, Leipzig; V1 Gallery, Copenhagen; Jerome Pauchant Gallery, Paris; and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York. His works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, SF MoMa, San Francisco, The Schwartz Collection at Harvard University, Cambridge, U.S. Department of the Treasury, Washington DC, Watermill Center, Watermill, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego among others. Wallace lives and works between Brooklyn and East Hampton, USA.