Mike Ryan

www.mmRyan.net

Sweet Universe

one-man exhibit in Milan for the Salone del Mobile, 2002
see blog page

intro by maurizio marsico

Sweet Universe. Achtung ! Look but don’t touch. It might be fatal. Like the atmosphere on Venus. Like a metal hydrogen shower. Like a liquid nitrogen cocktail. Sweet. Sweet like a terminal sunset in South L.A. Transmutating liquid metals leaving dense and filamentous traces of spores, slowly dancing in a unicellular, monochromatic world. Mercury tears weeping the mourning of private galaxies. Shapes, almost shadows, tingle the retina like the rings of a mental Saturn. Colors become Light Boxes. Incubators for future drawings. Luminous biospheres. Parallel microworlds seen through a wide-angle lens. Portable pulsating nebulae. Compilations of mute serenades.
What does a hydrocarbon taste like ?
What does Mars smell like ?
- Nothing is true. Everything is permitted -

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Looking up at Buildings

one-man exhibit at the Antonia Jannone Gallery, Milan, 2005
see blog page, see in flickr

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Nite Lites, 1999

personal installation for the exhibit Sottsass and Associates, Prato, 1999
see blog page

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Monitor Laminates

installation and designs for Abet Laminati's exhibit, Milan, 2000
see blog page

intro by Ettore Sottsass

The fact that global access to information will lead increasingly to the fragmentation of any ideology, any continuos thinking, any possibility of setting down a thought, or any hope for a static and absolute reality, is beginning to take shape. All this may also mean that people will stick closer and closer to the idea of existence as a succession of provisional states, apparitions and varyingly virtual sights. We think this general (if not global) attitude will also increasingly influence the design of our artificial environment, the design of all those tools needed for living.

With these observations in mind, Abet Laminati has devoted particular care to the appearance of surfaces rather than to actual weight and structural compactness. It may be imagined that surface, too, will loose its solid presence, its static, geometric definition, to become a bright event, a metaphor of mobility, constant metamorphosis and optical surprise rather than of conceptual perception.

Contemporary culture is ever more conditioned by that certain degree of the spectacular, the temporary and the accelerated, perhaps of the ambiguous, to which we are invited by the contemporary systems of so-called general, insistent information.

The reflections and the intense emotions felt, on being daily plunged into the violent contemporary revolution, have more or less driven us to attempt a different, updated representation of artificial surfaces.
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