Ryan Johnson: Self Storage

The Suzanne Geiss Company
76 Grand Street
New York, NY

Ryan Johnson’s Self Storage, featured a structured installa­tion of representational sculptures made from a variety of materials including wood, medical casting tape, and sheet metal. Presented as a fictional self-storage unit, Johnson aims to blur the distinctions between the real and the imagined by conjuring a hallucinatory space where anxieties become materialized as furniture, multi-tasking figures sprout extra limbs, and bicycles steer their riders. Informed by a sense of precarity and ambient instability, Johnson’s sculptures foreground the liminal nature of storage, focusing on themes of transition and fundamental life decisions about relationships, work, and family.

With sculptures arranged in a formation that alludes to a sense of accumulation, the gallery is transformed into a site where disparate ideas are left to linger and bleed into one another. In this way, the work approaches the idea of storage as a subliminal space, an analogy of interiority where objects are intended to bridge the psyche with physical forms. Appearing in silhouette, compressed, and with a built-in sense of perspective, the sculptures inhabit a paradoxical space as they attempt to function both as image and object. The work titled “Facing Chairs” clearly embodies this hybrid of illusion and materiality. The two chairs are constructed to display opposing perspectives, tilting away from one another despite being structurally bound by long carrying handles. An impossible object, the sculpture loops back in on itself indefinitely in an attempt to square internal pictures, ideals, and desires with external limitations.  

Many of the works represent an instance where an interior state is amplified into an exterior condition. For example, in one large figurative piece, the pursuit of perfection and equilibrium is rendered into the action of a person balancing a pyramid of oranges while transporting an oversized sculptural head. To make these works, Johnson starts with flat, cut-out shapes and then builds from the inside out, adding dimension by wrapping and layering the forms. Moving from flatness into dimensionality, while never really leaving one behind for the other, he situates the sculptures in a kind of limbo. Reverberating back and forth between flatness and form, the visual and the tactile, image and object, this perpetually indeterminate state extends outward bringing to mind a whole range of other contingencies: interior vs. exterior, visibility vs. invisibility, stability vs. instability, and mobility vs. immobility. Much like these conditions remain in flux, the exhibition delves into the transitory aspects of the self and the emotional pressures felt when everything feels up in air.

 Installation images by Matthew Placek

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