Book of Flowers
RYAN SYRELL

JUNE 8 – JULY 27, 2019
Opening Reception June 8th, 7 – 10pm

Night equalizes, it de-centers, and affirms that we are unstable and floating; unmoored from constructed time. It encourages wild oscillations between anxiety and ecstasy. A sense of porosity is amplified as sensation, perception, and memory wash together in nocturnal space.

The paintings in Book of Flowers are a suite of nocturnes; they begin at the moment of sunset and progress into night. This exhibition continues Syrell’s investigations into the affect of color and collapse of space as memory. Employing strategies of overwhelming scale and saturated palettes, each paintings’ intensity and restlessness become their own act within a play, scene within a film, or song on a record.

Night becomes the central subject of the work, directing the psyche of its inhabitants and its observers. Depicted are lived-in rooms, interiors full of material life both ephemeral and urgent. Screens access virtual spaces and windows offer portals to elsewhere while reflecting immediate surroundings. Cut flowers and vestiges of limbs haunt, while each element doubles as a barrier and an opening.