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"Stair-Tripping Photography"

Props from Lost at E Minor

 Lost At E Minor: For creative people

 

"Lost at E Minor is an online publication of inspiring art, design, music, photography and pop culture. They take low brow sensibilities and mash them up with the grittier elements of high brow culture." -Jess Zaino, contributor

John Wood on my photography

An Unexpected Disquiet, Surprise, and Charm:  

A Few Words on the Art of Ryn Wilson

by

John Wood

     I first saw Ryn Wilson’s work in 2010 when I judged the Clarence John Laughlin Prize, for which she was one of the finalists.  I admired her work and offered to write about it should she ever want me to.  Her photographs kept pulling me back to them again and again.  Her work is often about things having gone wrong—seriously wrong—yet Wilson manages to see an element of humor in the disasters, or “Seriously Failed Attempts,” as she calls them.  A girl with an injured foot has fallen down stairs, but it appears as if she was trying to manipulate her way up the stairs with three sets of crutches.  An elegant lady in a rich black dress is trying to stop her nose from bleeding but has blocked the wrong nostril.  Another lady in a blue slip who is obviously perplexed and confounded stands in a bath tub trying to trim her hair but has made a mess of her hair, the tub, and the entire bathroom.  Serious art that seems to verge on tragedy yet can usurp humor by intruding into it a jocular stance immediately captivates a viewer, if only because it is so surprising and rare today in our self-consciously serious times.  Wilson describes some of this work as “film stills,” but hers are nothing like Cindy Sherman’s boring stills.  These are stills caught at a moment of crisis.  When the moment is as critical and the art is as intense as Wilson’s—intense in its drama, oddness, and peculiar beauty—it is a surprise and a revelation.  And Wilson suggests to us that all tragic revelation need not be weighted with Sophoclean or Shakespearian doom.  The smaller, odd, peculiar, homely tragedies, our “Seriously Failed Attempts,” are as real to us as Phaedra’s or Lady Macbeth’s were to them.   

     In another series entitled “Inhuman,” a girl with long blond hair continues to have problems with a mannequins and black ooze.  These might also be seen as being somewhat humorous, but to my eye they seem far more disquieting.  The ooze looks like black blood, especially on her legs and thighs, and the mannequin is always fragmentary or has actually come apart in each of the images.  And so the viewer is left wondering if the girl is soon to come apart, as well.  There is even a frightening element of Nakata’s film Ringu about these photographs.  And one of the most curious aspects of them is again their peculiar beauty—as well as a disquieting eroticism, an eroticism that is not overt and only suggested subtly through the girl’s hair, her obvious vulnerability, and the bits of the mannequin’s body.    

     Ryn Wilson’s art requires us spend as much time trying to understand our emotional response to it as it does to the question of what her work might mean.  With her art one should forget the old-fashioned questions of meaning and be open to an emotional jostling.  Her art has the power to jostle our emotions through a surprising blend of unexpected imagery.  We are left charmed, charmed in its most magical sense, by what she offers us:  the rich complex of emotions we desire and demand from any authentic work of art.

MFA Group Show

I have work in this show along with my classmates. It runs from January 28th-February 25th at the UNO campus gallery. The opening reception is Thursday February 3rd at 8pm.

Recent work

Play these videos simultaneously...

Patient from kathryn wilson on Vimeo.

Dr. Maruyama from Kathryn Wilson on Vimeo.

Combined, these films make up "Scissiparity", a scientific term describing reproduction by fission. This is a process consisting of gradual division into two parts, each of which then becomes a separate and independent organism. The story is of a pair of lovers split in two, now existing in their separate realities yet seeking the other in their own way.

Part I. A woman with amnesia searches for something of great importance, yet she is unaware of what it might be.

Part II. When Dr. Maruyama discovers that his past lover still exists he is determined to find a way to reach her and spend eternity together. He creates an elixir of immortality which he injects in himself and takes other half with him on his journey to find her.

But will he?

I am currently working on the soundtrack, a process which is totally new to me, with my baby who knows a thing or two about that.

Some shots to continue the string of floating images.

Perception Dictates Capability

My latest installation consists of three separate pieces which all bring up the idea of expanding beyond perceived limitations while recognizing the impossibility of perfection.

 

"Rearrange"  Digital photography in handmade lightboxes

"Floating" Series of projections

 

"Milne Boys Home" Installation with medium format photography

Compagnie Marie Chouniard

Unbelievable things the human body is capable of.