• Roy Ananda
• Natasha Bieniek
• Dale Cox
• Sebastian Di Mauro
• Daniel Dorall
• Marian Drew
• Vincent Fantauzzo
• Juan Ford
• Neil Haddon
• Matthew Hunt
• Louisa Jenkinson
• Donna Marcus
• Harry Nankin
• Shaun O'Connor
• Helen Pynor
• Reko Rennie
• Victoria Reichelt
• Natalie Ryan
• Charles Robb
• Yhonnie Scarce
• Roh Singh
• Ken Yonetani

Natalie Ryan

Born Australia: working primarily with sculpture and installation. Ryan completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Victorian College of the Arts 2002 and is currently completing her Masters of Fine Art at Monash University with the assistance of an Australian Postgraduate Award. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and has recently commenced a three-year studio residency at Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts. Her selected Solo and Group exhibitions include Devoid Matter, dianne tanzer gallery,Melbourne Static, West Space, Melbourne Void, Kings ARI, Gallery, Melbourne and The Space In-Between, MIR 11, Melbourne Team Australia, curated by Veronica Tello, Carlton Hotel, Melbourne 2008 A4 Art show, Westspace, The Devolution Project Curated Simon Maidment & Mark Feary, West Space Fan Art, Ziehl-Abegg "In Vent"� Technology Centre, Kunzelsau, Germany. Woolllahra Small Sculpture Prize, 2007 Woollahra Council Chambers. Commisssions include 2006 Ziehl-Abegg Australia: Artwork for permanent display in the new "In Vent"� Technology Centre in Germany The Royal Children's Hospital, Parliament House, and The American Embassy: Art work for July 4th Celebrations.

Exhibitions

Melbourne Art Fair: The Day The Machine Started - 2010

"Line honours go to the sharp display of Dianne Tanzer Gallery. Chilly paintings by Juan Ford, showingly prickly leafy perches bound with tape labelled "fragile", sit in a slick white cube, which contrasts with the rich Victorian building. Upon the shiny white floor, however, silicone herbivores by Natalie Ryan slump in meltdown, perhaps mortified by radiation or a sinister baboon lurking behind a rear partition. The whole installation is ingenious and unsettling."Robert Nelson, The Age, Upscale fair, scaled-down range, 6 August, 2010

     

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Pretty in Pink - 2010

Natalie Ryan's strange taxidermies that hang between life and death are placed within a landscape of Reko Rennie's indigenous patterning of flora and fauna. Ryan's velvety creatures explore the concepts of trophy taxidermy, an object prized, and displayed to showcase the owner's triumph over nature. The uncanny malformations of strange animals are familiar, yet foreign. Wild, untamed creatures are frozen in movement and time.

     

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Unnatural Selection - 2010

Unnatural Selection was curated by Simon Gregg at Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale

                   

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Linden Innovators 1 - 2009

Pale pink, flocked and prized. This installation explores the concept of the taxidermy trophy as an object associated with triumph, a physical item displayed to remind the owner and their peers of his/her achievement. In the case of the animal cadaver as a trophy, it is the achievement of the kill, the power of taking ownership over another being, which is esteemed. The dead body becomes a trophy for permanent display through the process of taxidermy.

                 

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Devoid Matter - 2009

Artist Statement Derived from the process of taxidermy these internal casts taken from the animal after the dermis has been removed become a solid mass of a lost being, a devoid matter. This original cast is used to stretch the skin of the deceased animal from that particular species over and over, to become an armature that perpetually stands in for the latest animal specimens body that is discarded. This unusual image of the internals exposed without the skin as a border, unwraps the form and in doing so blurs the boundaries between the body and its surroundings. By working with these uncanny forms and recreating a fine coat of artificial 'fur' I hope to further blur the boundaries of the animal forms through colour and texture, to expose the devoid matter that is usually hidden by the coat of another animal. Natalie Ryan, 2009

                 

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A Void - 2008

The body ought to learn to develop the figures of slow motion, of suspense, stopping, fixity, slowness...This art of absorbing energy without giving it back, suspending a movement without falling back, escaping those prolongations which give our bodily processes a certain gracelessness is also the art of slow motion and its tragic effect. We have given up that slowness for the prestige of acceleration. - Jean Baudrillard The compulsion for incessant activity turns us into automatons of urgency. Yet, paradoxically, we exist in haste for the lulling effect. Our movements fuse moments together, as a defensive reflex against the insurmountability of time. Through movement, the minutia of time may be revealed, yet it is quickly engulfed back into itself- almost suggesting our activities can keep up with it's perpetual consistency. The tragic effect of slow motion and arrested movement is that it prevents time's cannibalisation. Instead time gets to exist as loose, unruly fragments escaping the onslaught of ever-more time. In Natalie Ryan's exhibition A Void partially articulated creatures inhabit a black velvet square; their forms suspended as solidified motion. The figures appear unusually cadaverous, as if exposed to some form of instantaneous petrification. They show what Baudrillard labels, "a perfect climax in immobility."� Ryan's work, as a three-dimensional freeze frame, makes us acutely sensitive to our own lack of fixity. We become aware of our incomplete pauses and our constant shifting, as we circle this field of "perfect stops"� mid-propulsion. We are witness to a zone of immobility in our vast tract of endless movement; this is not simply due to the animalistic representation of stasis, but the inviolable quality that the velvet texture creates. The pure black velvet appears untouched, perfectly traceless. To trespass onto it, would risk leaving a history of our violation. Our ceaseless activity connects to a fundamental desire to not leave traces. As though traces drag back a past perception of movement, a leakage of time that makes times self-erasure incomplete. We become aware of the black velvet border sealing off the space. A detached zone, that feels hermetically sealed despite its openness. Creating an effect close to the "pure presence"� that Baudrillard calls "unbearable."� Hence, it is not only the suspension of forms, but also the untouchable conditions that help sustain the works expression of fixity. With its annulment of motion, the work acts as a reprieve from "the prestige of acceleration."� Yet, the suspension creates a haunting effect. The work's self-containment with it's non-motion and unshifting light, separates it from the continuity of entropic decline, in which a permanent shifting towards detritus is unhaltable. Yet, the work seems less a monument for resistance to entropy through suspension or a display of revivable torpor; the animals don't appear to strain in their poses. Instead, perhaps they represent a purified aftermath amidst new conditions. This would seem appropriate as the animal figures evolve from taxidermy models, the cores of a process that represents a rebirth contingent on the stationery, an evolution towards stillness. Reversed anticipation. Get rid of all your inertial energy and come to an immediate stop, like a noise absorbed without echo. (What fascinates us in the colour black, in the black body is this idea of total absorption of light, which is equivalent to the dizziness of immobility for the body). - Jean Baudrillard Black exists in two forms; there is the nocturnal darkness of the absence of light and the solidified darkness of the complete absorption of light by a surface. The former is a default setting, whilst solidified darkness if perfected could allow for a pitch-dark room despite a light being on. The lack of reflected light on black surface, is the working of a 'dark gravity' that is unshifting and unresponsive as it soaks up all light waves indiscriminately. Kandinsky suggest black is "something extinguished, like a spent funeral pyre, something motionless, like a corpse."� The lack of motion is both the absence of reflecting light waves and the effect this causes. Black, with its refusal to delineate shadow from itself, appears permanently fixed against shifting light- there is no visual echo only an absorptive void. Hence, the impact of circling Ryan's installation is visually reticent, as the forms smothered in black and surrounded by black cleave to their own shadowiness. Concealing the specificity of their contours they are "bodies lost in themselves and in space." The opaque darkness masks the creatures, exacerbating their already partially undelineated frames, "turning the forms back on themselves."� Yet, the lack of definition of external features is counterbalanced with an overemphasis of internal nuances, for instance an overly tenuated rib cage or specifically accentuated leg joint. Certain details recede whilst others are highlighted due to the interiority of the taxidermy model constructed to rigidly hold the outer remnants of an actual animal. These sculptural forms cloaked in darkness appropriately highlight the secret underlying structures devoid of light in the living creature. This allows the figures to escape taxonomic identification, instead sanctifying a shared interior consistency that even the human figure partially ascribes to. In contrast though, as we stand looking at these dry charcoal creatures balanced as though internally crystallised, our bodies flaunt their fluent motion. We are not quiet there yet. Amy Marjoram, 2008. missamymarjoram@yahoo.com.au

     

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Static - 2008

Static is part of a body of work I've been exploring for the last couple of years centered around the aesthetic representation of the cadaver throughout history, in particular the animal cadaver. I'm interested in the cadaver as it becomes a secondary image and new object after death, abandoned and misplaced. In this case I have been working with taxidermy. These animal forms have derived from taxidermy casts, with there dermis removed they become unwrapped and in doing so the boundaries between inner and outer become blurred. It is this blurring that I have attempted to further manipulate through colour, texture and light, allowing the forms to absorb into each other and their surroundings.

     

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The Devolution Project - 2008

Natalie Ryan's installations probe ideals of the physical body in life via the paradox of death. Intense research via anatomical drawing underpins Ryan's fascination with the dislocation of the cadaver in western culture. Her playful, disarming, yet faithful taxidermic reconstructions of animals allow her to explore the western ritual of divorcing emotional and personal attributes to the abject corpse. Ryan's faux animal corpses become fetishistic objects of substitute, and the gallery a pseudo shrine. Candice Cranmers

       

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