EKPHRASIS: A conversation between Kerry Manders + brandy ryan on Ryan Van Der Hout's Collecting Dust
photoED Magazine
2022
Kerry Manders: "Vanitas with Tulips, Pear and Skull," one of my favourite images from the Collecting Dust series. It's a still life with an abiding sense of movement in it. Look at the way the flowers are bending towards the skull. They might be covered in dust and ash, but they aren't wilting or shrivelled up. They seem bloomy, fleshy, robust. Still, life.
brandy ryan: Even the verb tense of the series title — that present participle of collecting — suggests activity rather than stillness. There's a tension and a mystery we are being invited to explore: what — or who — is collecting dust? For sure, the obvious answer is the objects that are covered in it. But it's the photographer, Ryan, not time, doing the collecting, the covering.
KM: In recreating the old Dutch masters, in sculpturally and photographically replicating Baroque vanitas paintings, Ryan creates anew an artificial sense of antiquity. Of time passing and objects past with his studio dust and ash. These images have a really dramatic effect. Ryan addresses this direction in a project statement: he drew inspiration from the ruin follies of eighteenth-century Europe — buildings that were made to look as if they're the architectural remains of buildings ... that never actually existed. What do we do with this allusion to past artifice?
br: Ruin follies is such a great term. And the as if is doing a lot of work there. The creation of seeming remains is necessarily so pristine, so precise. Ryan's work has this quality, too. His tablescapes and object sculptures are meticulous. He puts himself in conversation and collusion with older forms. There's an intensely citational aspect to his work. He conjures the past, going so far as to suggest that structures accrue value over time.
KM: Yes! he navigates the present, the "collecting," and the past, the callback to ruin follies, the dust, and in so doing also conjures the future. It's a kind of photographic ekphrasis that renders time elastic, fluid, unstable. There's a futuristic, sci-fi, post-apocalyptic feeling to the images. Dream-like or surreal, maybe? Although Ryan isn't physically in these photographs, his presence is profound. In documentary work, we might forget about the photographer; we're often encouraged not to think about subjectivity behind the camera, controlling the frame. That's impossible in this conceptual series. A phrase just popped into my head: the afterlife of still life.
br: In this context, the "after" is complicated. Ryan made this work during a global pandemic. When we saw Collecting Dust in person at United Contemporary, it was the first exhibition we'd attended in person since the onset of the pandemic. And you could feel it: the darkness of the images, the sense of isolation the series elicits, how they spoke to, echoed, what we'd just been through. But there was also an eerie — and joyful, if trepidatious — sense of aftermath. Our lives had quite literally been stilled by a global pandemic.
KM: I think that's part of the trepidation: is it even safe out here in the afterlife?! We'd only been viewing art online, so there was something magical about seeing it live and in person again. It makes me think of the spots of light in Ryan's extremely dark images. I think the technical term I want here is tenebrism — the way in which the spots of light really pop against and in contrast to a predominance of darkness.
br: Wearing masks it was hard recognizing anyone. This series also felt like a representation of the dust we'd been collecting. It's funny: there are so many things that are evoked when we think of flowers. Growth, bloom, death. But dust — we rarely see flowers covered in dust. It's almost like they are never set out and then left alone long enough to accumulate it. That neglect or isolation feels absolutely evocative of the lockdowns we were just emerging from. I felt like I had been covered in dust, too — like I had to shake off pandemic isolation.
KM: I really wanted to get up close to this work. Usually, I'm content to keep an "appropriate" — loaded as that term is — physical distance in galleries. Here, I caught sight of my own breath on one of Ryan's frames. That felt like an admonishment to move back! But I had to get in there to discern the details, the textures. Flowers are inherently like that: evocative, inviting. It's hard to truly appreciate them from afar. We want to gain proximity, be close enough to take them in fully.
br: Initially, I thought "Compote" had one butterfly in it. The others are so much harder to see, camouflaged in that floral arrangement. I think Ryan foregrounds the process of both his making and of our seeing in his work. You and I were immediately curious about how he made the work. Process isn't typically our first question. We're both strongly impelled toward the interpretative.
KM: I think here the process is the point — part of it, anyway. And "Compote" is a deliciously rich title in this regard. "Compote" can mean the preserved or cooked fruit, but it can also refer to the stemmed dish that holds it. The dish or the dessert. The contents or the container. It is an Old French word meaning mixture. Ryan asks us to consider form and content, process and product.
br: That title, like others in the series, is a good example of the lightness — of the humour and fun to be had here — that Ryan is having. It's not all doom and gloom, despite the real gravitas of the funereal flowers and skulls and extinguished candles. There's hope in the dark — hat tip to Rebecca Solnit. There's word play and visual puns and so many signs of life among the symbols of impeding death and decay.
KM: Unsurprisingly, given my work with and about grief and mourning, I want to talk a little more about death. You know that I love memento mori art (which literally translated means "remember that you will die"). Ryan created this series at the height of the COVID-19 crisis, when the spectre of our own mortality loomed large. Fatality rates skyrocketed, and no one remained untouched in some way by the virus. Private grief and public mourning ensued, the likes of which we've never seen in our lifetime. Ryan evokes that here. The sheer scale of it all was — is — mind-boggling. The effects of the pandemic are not only deeply felt in the present, but also thrown forward into a future that is still, in many ways, unknown.
br: I think you've touched on something that speaks to the effectiveness of Ryan's modern take on older forms — the memento mori picture and the very-closely-related vanitas still life, both popular in the seventeenth century. If memento mori reminds us of death, vanitas reminds us of the vanity — in the sense of worthlessness — of worldly pleasures, objects, material possessions. The idea behind those paintings was that our earthly life was mere preparation for the afterlife. I'm thinking of the "afterlife" of this pandemic, the ways in which we have felt cut off, out of context, strange. Pandemic life really and truly messed with our felt sense of time. It makes me think about what flowers feel, if they are sentient, about what we do to them: cut them, stick them in a glass with water, watch them die.
KM: There's something tender, fragile in this. And humbling! We can merely and fleetingly touch (on) the aporias that are death and beauty — and let them touch us. Flowers are a potent example of the delicacy of beauty and its inevitable demise, which is maybe why we're so drawn to them. I'm looking again at "Vanitas with Tulips, Pear and Skull" and the way those flowers are impelled towards that skull — touching it, even. Not to beat a dead hors — er, flower — but they have everything to do with one another.
br: This makes me think of Bahar Orang's Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty. If Ryan meditates on death in Collecting Dust, I believe he also and equally meditates on beauty. Throughout her book, Orang uses flowers as a touchstone for contemplating beauty. She looks to flowers in her attempt to understand and articulate it. She writes that she "can no longer grab beauty by her wrists and demand articulation or meaning. I can only take account of where things touch." I love that idea of locating beauty in the between of things — in their connection but necessary separation. In their mystery. I love the idea that while artists obsessively write and paint and photograph about death and beauty, death and beauty remain ineffable. We can only hope to touch on their meanings. Like Orang's flowers, we know them well and not at all. It's an abiding paradox.
KM: This conversation is making me think about an uncharacteristically short and sentimental essay by Freud, published in 1915, called "On Transience." There, he remembers a walk he took with the poet Rilke in 1913, where the young poet lamented that beauty would fade, that all is ephemeral and mortal. Transience diminished Rilke's pleasure in present beauty. Freud, on the other hand, argued that it's the very quality of, say, a flower's transience that adds to rather than undermines both our enjoyment of it and its value. For Freud, Rilke's attitude is a protest again mourning. Freud himself, forever confronted and confounded by mourning in his own practice, embraced the experience of it.
br: Oh, the melancholy poet! I think that Ryan's work is, and you and I are, on Freud's side of their argument. I'm struck that both Ryan's work and Freud's essay were crafted in the intensity of mourning time — the current pandemic and World War I, respectively. Both historical contexts meant travel restrictions, separation from loved ones, untold death, mass mourning. Both events robbed people of so many things we love.
KM: Perhaps that is another idea Ryan invites us to sit with, however uncomfortably. We think we know what death is, what loss means — and we don't have the slightest clue, not really. Not to evoke an existential crisis, but there's something about the darkness and dust that also shrouds what we think we know, what we think we can see and fathom. Mom died during the pandemic — not of COVID — but it occurs to me that we're having this conversation at my desk, where a small container of Mom's ashes sits...
br: ... collecting dust.
KM: "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust." I'm not a biblical sort of person, but I've always been touched by this graveside committal. I like the notion that our bodies are composed of natural elements and will be returned to nature in the end. There's a grand — and comforting — sense of the connectedness of it all, of us all.
br: Connection and mystery. When Orang calls flowers "queer," I think she's gesturing towards the uncanny, the unknowability of them, that "strangeness familiar and unfamiliar." Ryan's flowers are queer, too. They invite us to sit in alluring darkness, with our unknowingness, perhaps even collecting dust.
Ryan Van Der Hout is an experimental photographer and sculptor based in Toronto. His work is proudly represented by United Contemporary Gallery.