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PHOTO COURTESY OF TRAVER GALLERY

TEXTURIZED. In “Particles,” Ryman makes use of sweepings form the studio floor in order to bring texture to the surface. (Right) “Green Bars” by Cordy Ryman is one of the works on display at Tacoma’s Traver Gallery through April 6. (Top of page) “Milk Grain” by New York artist Cordy Ryman.

Ryman brings raw edge to Traver

By Dave R. Davison

Ordinarily, Tacoma’s Traver Galley functions more or less as a wonderful annex to the Museum of Glass (MOG) as it is right next door. The Traver usually offers a splendid display of glass art made by masters of that medium from all the world over as well as from our own region. As a result, the Traver resides nice and cozy alongside MOG.

With its newest exhibit, however – “New Work” by New York artist Cordy Ryman – the Traver departs from its nothing-but-glass diet and offers something new for gallery viewers to sink their visual teeth into.

Son of Robert Ryman, the famous monochrome painter and minimalist, Cordy Ryman grew up conversant in a visual vocabulary that most others have to arrive at academically. Cordy Ryman’s mother, Merrill Wagner, is from the Tacoma area and young Ryman spent most of the summers of his youth here.

It is this Tacoma connection that prompted gallery owner William Traver to have Ryman exhibit in the Tacoma branch. “This is an opportunity to bring [Ryman’s] work back to Tacoma for people to see,” noted Traver.

Ryman revels in his raw materials and in building pieces that work with a given space. The new works in the current exhibit consist of paint and other materials on rectangles of wood and arrangements of lumber.

Tones of white, silver and gray dominate his pallet, but there are also creamy oranges, flat blues, chalky greens and hard-edged reds. Ryman also delights in the use of florescent colors to coat the backs, tops, bottoms and seams of his constructions. The resulting florescent glow hides in the shadows casting subtle tints on the floating walls of the antique gallery space.

In a plump, wooden, wall-mounted piece called “Milk Grains,” for example, the florescent orange-pink on top of the piece casts a subtle vermilion glow upon the wall above it. The front of the piece, meanwhile, is blue with fat, white wood grains painted on. The blue of the face brings out the orange glow on the wall.

Much of Ryman’s work is involved with engaging the space within which it exists. “I have been using architectural elements as a starting point for my work,” he asserts. “If I look at a space as the canvas itself I can respond to it using sculptural, architectural and painted ‘moves’.”

An example of this playing with the space is a site-specific piece called “Traver Corner Stitch.” Here, a series of two-by-twos joins one wall panel of the gallery to an adjacent panel. The individual “stitches” are painted white with a silver-gray section that corresponds to the shadow between the two panels. The horizontal pieces cast shadows to form a zig-zag that stitches the two wall panels together.

“I work with corners a lot,” explained Ryman, “but the Traver didn’t have a corner. I wanted to stitch the space together. I wanted to make something happen.”

There are also a number of “wall presses” in which lengths of painted four-by-four lumber with squares of plywood at either end run between the floor and the wall and pretend to be holding the space together. Thus Ryman’s exhibit is both a display of individual compositions and an installation.

Ryman works with materials that are non-traditional for artists. In addition to lumber, there is puffy “gorilla glue,” the black scrawl of felt marker and flimsy staples (used as a hinge as well as a connector). Ends trimmed from the making of one construction can find their way onto other surfaces as in “White Scatter” in which short lengths of tongue-and-groove siding are stuck to half the surface.  The three dimensional elements in the mosaic-like “Scatter” are also scraps cut from the ends of boards. In “Scatter,” bold red rectangles (both two- and three-dimensional) play upon a spattered green surface.

Ryman traffics in ragged, jagged edges, raw surfaces and grit. The above-mentioned Scatter features a piece of wood with bent nails sticking out and the shadow on the wall is as serrated as the dentition of a sabertooth tiger. A piece called “Particles” has an unfinished bottom edge  torn and tattered by the buzz saw  that is done in the signature florescent pink.

Everything is grist for Ryman’s mill including the debris swept up from the studio floor. “Particles” includes such sweepings that are stuck to the polyurethane with which Ryman covered the surface. The surface was then divided into bars of white outlined in black marker that extend out from a central cluster of colorful, three-dimensional wood blocks.

“Camo Sweepings” also utilizes floor sweepings that were fixed to the surface and then coated in an abstraction of white, florescent pink and red-brown paint applied in a pattern that resembles camouflage.

Ryman’s use of his materials displays a freedom that is not bound by a concern for fussy craftsmanship and pretty finish. With an almost Dada spirit (calling Kurt Schwitters), Ryman plays his materials like an unruly guitar fuzzed with feedback. It is refreshing to make contact with this free and improvisational art that nevertheless has an active mind at work beneath it.

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