Ryan Dewey, “Coming to Terms with my Glacial Now” (detail view miniature glacier tool), 2015 – ongoing, limestone: 23 x 12 x 3 in. ; glacier tool: 13 x 11 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Ryan Dewey, “Implements for Future Glacial Scouring” (reconstructed granite boulder), 2016, granite, stainless steel, 3 x 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Ryan Dewey, “Implements for Future Glacial Scouring” (clay landscape model), 2017, clay, oak, 16 x 16 x 2 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Ryan Dewey, “Implements for Future Glacial Scouring” (icebox & amp; clay landscape model), 2017, clay, stainless steel, ice, icebox: 8 x 10 x 12 in. ; landscape model: 18 x 24 x 4 in. Courtesy of the artist.
a Window to Sculpture Emerging Artist Series 2019 Exhibition
Ryan Dewey: Lines of Descent
Ryan Dewey: Lines of Descent
Euclid Ave. Gallery
January 25 – March 15, 2019
Dual opening receptions, Friday, January 25 at 5:30-8:00 P.M. with Kelley O’Brien
The Artist Talks: Ryan Dewey, 6:15 p.m. in the Euclid Avenue Gallery
The Artist Talks: Kelley O’Brien, 7:00 p.m. in the Main Gallery
Years ago, Ryan learned to make tools by hand one block away from The Sculpture Center as an apprentice blacksmith at Cleveland Ornamental Iron (now closed). He views this geographic return to the neighborhood as a moment of convergence where his interests come back full circle. Ryan is excited to exhibit at The Sculpture Center as a W2S artist as it will allow him an opportunity to produce a new body of work specifically focused on traditions of tool making, and how tool making might enable new collaborations between humans and the natural world.
Artist Statement
“My work focuses on discovering new ways to think about nature across deep time (past, present, and future). I am particularly interested in building collaborations between contemporary humans and geologic forces for both near future and deep future scenarios. I utilize empathy, ritual, and speculative design to communicate about our relationship to nature. By drawing formal comparisons between geologic forces and human activity I aim to knit a tighter connection between contemporary humans and the rapidly changing climate conditions of our current geologic era: the anthropocene. What I’m after is a set of tools to prime natural landscapes for collaborations across time scales in a way that references the human systems that accelerated global warming and delayed the next ice age. To get there I build hand tools that help me better understand geologic forces and speculate about new ways to engage the functions displayed by geologic forces like glaciers, volcanoes, and the rock cycle. These hand tools and physical sites of priming are simultaneously memorials, warnings, and sites of hopefulness about our situatedness in nature.”
Short Bio
Ryan Dewey’s work is a kind of socially-engaged ecological dreaming that takes shape as installation, performance, research, workshops, and land art to highlight the entanglements between people, places, and land use. He has been a resident at ACRE, the Alps Art Academy, and a visiting researcher in the department of cognitive science at Case Western Reserve University where he wrote Hack the Experience: Tools for Artists from Cognitive Science (now available here). He is a member of non//sense collective and founder of the collective Geologic Cognition Society (geocog.org). His work blurs disciplinary lines and often appears in unexpected venues including the British Society for Geomorphology, the American Association of Geographers, Kickstarter, the University of Bern, Concordia University (Montreal), the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, the Annenberg School for Communication (Philadelphia), Progressive Insurance (Cleveland), MONU (Rotterdam), KERB (Melbourne), and living history festivals, as well as more traditional art venues including SPACES, ACRE, and other artist-run spaces. Visit Ryan Dewey’s website.
