Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Creole Portraits III alludes to the 18th century practice by slave women on Caribbean plantations of using tropical plants as natural abortifacients. As an act of political resistance against their exploitation as “breeders” of new slaves and to protest the inhumanity of slavery, some slave women chose to either abort or kill their offspring. Armed with practical knowledge passed on orally from their African ancestors and/or Amerindian counterparts, enslaved Creole women collected the seeds, bark, flowers, sap, and roots from various plants which allowed them to secretly put an end to their pregnancies.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Known But to God: The Dug Up, Dissected, and Disposed for the Sake of Medicine by Doreen Lynnette Garner is a small, suspended sculpture composed of glass, silicone, steel, epoxy putty, pearls, Swarovski crystals, and whiskey. At once attractive and repulsive, the sculpture combines objects of adornment with what appears to be viscera. The sculpture’s curious delicacy evokes a ritualistic catharsis, in response to persistent forms of medical racial violence and objectification for Black people in America and around the world.

Installation (Installation)

Epiphany…learnt through hardship is composed of a bronze sculpture depicting the model of the little dancer of Degas, in the pose of a female nude photographed by Edward Weston (Nude, 1936) accompanied by a blue cube. The work refers to the positive occupations of space and the absence of form and structure, to the relationship between the visible and the invisible, to memory, and to the relationship we have to images and to our history. The work refers to childhood, biography and learning to question how meaning is made and how history is remembered and performed.

Installation (Installation)

You see without light is a group of photographs around the theme of Bauhaus. This includes a reference to one of Gander’s works which is the Bauhaus manifesto without dots on the letter ‘i’, as well as drawings of his ideal art school.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The work consists of a work inside a work. The spectator is presented with a commissioned documentary on a flat-screen Tv on the subject of the production of the making of an artwork that doesn’t exist entitled The magic and the meaning (2008). The imaginary film, The magic and the meaning , is described only within the documentary, which follows parts of the making of the film, extracts from interviews with the writer and film maker Dan Fox and the artist and maker of the work Ryan Gander; as well as showing short slow-motion sections of the film that does not exist.

Installation (Installation)

This work is meditative and fragile. These abstract forms are projected slides belonging to another lecture, Travelogue , where the images have been removed. What is left is the hole of the frame of the slide that light draws upon and projects on the wall.

Photography (Photography)

Ryan Gander is a collector. He keeps all sorts of documents to create from. His studio is full of found images, personal images, documents copied from internet or cutout of newspapers.

Installation (Installation)

A vehicle without light is a group of more personal photographs. This includes an image of a pirate radio in the 1960s, a story from the BBC website and the photo of Mary Aurore. Mary Aurore, is in fact a character he invented whose identity is impossible to determine but who appears in various works.