EXHIBITION

TROPICAL MALICE

H Project Space + H Gallery Chiang Mai, Krung Thep, Bangkok, 08/06/2015 - 09/27/2015

201 Sathorn Soi 12, Bangkok

ABOUT

H Gallery is very pleased to announce installations by Giles Ryder across two of our spaces. These exhibitions are a result of an Asialink Arts Residency award from Australia which supported Ryder to produce works at Ne’Na Contemporary Artspace in Chiang Mai. This is H Gallery’s third collaboration with the Bangkok-based artist and we are delighted to welcome him back.

Ryder’s practice has a hard-edged quality that plays on the cultural significance of form and he works with a variety of media that includes lacquer, light, mirror and foam. The often reflective surfaces of his works suggest an advertising or consumerist sensibility but countered by a meditative minimal and geometric aesthetic. As dense presences within the gallery space, the works’ sense of objecthood can subtly draw our attention to the very experience of site and place.

For the installations at H Chiang Mai and H Project Space, Ryder has adapted readymade light structures from Cambodia, where they are found situated behind Buddha statues in a temple and cast mandala patterns. The artist is interested in the diverse significance of the technology as it suggests both religious worship and the hypnotic world of techno or disco music. A series of soft geometric paintings make a skewed reference to Mondrian and other giants of canonical art history. Here grids of primary colours are treated with metallic and fluorescent finishes and both create and dissolve pictorial space. For Ryder, it is the transgression of a ‘pure’ use of materials and form that allows for the emergence of new artistic languages.

Ryder’s installations and paintings offer perceptual shifts that cross the experience of materiality or formal qualities to bring us to culturally embedded meanings in off-kilter and always fascinating fashion.

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