Ryan Rennie
BACK DIRT
February 28, 2020 – March 20, 2020
Rennie’s work confronts the commercial production of the “rustic copy,”; objects found in big-box stores which often show flattened scenes of ancient ceramic vessels, injection molded and stamped into plastic in high volume and sold for little- an inversion of the original slow process that created the vessels that these objects make reference to.
Rennie reintroduces these often dismissed objects back into the medium and vernacular of the ceramic tradition in hopes of showing that an object can still retain its value, even emotional resonance, through cycles of repeated reproduction and mutation of materials.
His sculptures––re-makings of unremarkable but evocative objects he associates with a suburban adolescence––tell of age and time passed, despite being polished reflections and products of modern consumption.
In the context of an archaeological dig where the source material for these works might be found, Back Dirtrefers to “The excavated, discarded material from a site that has generally been sifted for artifacts and is presumed to be of no further archaeological significance.”