Thursday, March 13, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Art: Seeing between the lines

By Gregory Crosby

In drawing, many artists and viewers will proclaim "It's all about the line." Thick or thin, airy or heavy, supple or jagged, the line is one of those basic elements so very basic that often it disappears into whatever visual concept it happens to be supporting. In minimalist art, the line often functions as the whole content of the piece, and usually in an austere way that proclaims itself rather loudly, all caps: LINE. But there are many ways to bring a line to sudden life, even in (especially in) abstraction.

The amorphous yet deliberate shapes filling UNLV's Donna Beam Gallery are not quite paintings and not quite sculpture. They waver between the two states, and in this wavering that seduces the eye lies the design of David Ryan. His master of fine art thesis show, enigmatically titled Rum Runner II (The Director's Cut) and on view through March 22, is an exercise in carefully layered abstraction that at first glance seems of a piece with every other large blot that has found its way onto gallery walls. But the second glance shows what Ryan is really up to: the creation of a fractured and irregular line that slowly fascinates, displacing in the viewer's eye the whole of the construction.

These large pieces, vaguely circular and crumpled, share common motifs: a thin ring of space, white, imperfectly encircling a larger center, also white expect for one end, which features a small field of color, bisected by a straight line as if someone has taken a white flower petal and dipped one portion of it gently into a bowl of dye. The thin space between the inner and outer blot is colored as well, producing a waxing and waning line, herky-jerky in its path yet surprisingly fluid, thickening and thinning as it defines itself into a lopsided ring. As the viewer's eye is drawn in by this line, it sees fractures and lines deep within it where the panels have been layered (an effect that isn't obvious from a distance). Drawing closer, one realizes that different pieces have been fused together to create the image.

While there are doubtless formal jargons to explicate the technique, one from kindergarten will do nicely: It's as if Ryan has cut out irregular shapes from sheets of construction paper and laid them upon one another, allowing the play between their differing shape and color to produce new types of lines. Only Ryan has writ this playful process large, to create enormously pleasing abstractions wherein the line that defines the shape becomes more important than the shape itself. The small contributions of color, both on the inner shape and in the line itself, anchor the abstraction without suffocating it. Without the "dips" of color, how very austere and minimalist these would be.

When Ryan departs from this particular technique, and draws attention to the shape, the result is less satisfying. There's only one noncircular piece, a soft, two-pronged shape (one end dipped in magenta and purple, and looking inescapably phallic) that juts into the surrounding ring with such force it overwhelms the lively, layered line that separates the planes. The result is an abstraction that is more wacky than sublime, and I'm unsure if this is because of the nature of the shape itself, or merely because in this instance it displaces the line that contains it. Circular forms, even highly irregular ones, still somehow trump other geometries in their ability to fully engage the senses.

That said, Ryan's show is one of the better exercises--more focused, more thoughtful, more visually appealing--in pure abstraction to come out of UNLV's art department. Whoever the Rum Runner is, here's to his supplying Ryan with ever more inspiration.