Blown and fused glass, various sizes.
Made at Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA
In August 2019, the Museum of Glass Visiting Artist Residency Program hosted RYAN! in their world-class Hot Shop for one week to create new works in glass with the Hot Shop Team. This was a part of a 6-month residency series hosted in conjunction with two exhibitions grounded in indigenous artists.
The “Remains“ series of vessels contains stories fused in blown glass filled with themes and imagery inspired by installation projects such as Coyote Now, Disconnected Towers, Canaries, and Manifest Signs. Within these iconographic glass stories, a series of vibrant vignettes emerge. Fox jumps over Coyote’s bones, restoring him in the starlight. Two birds, both dead, mirrors the complexity of our societal decisions, which often seem to offer choices that are both harmful to the environment. Disconnected towers loom over our neighborhoods as beacons that portend gentrification and scaffolds that uphold societal ideology and duplicity. Tower cranes place the final bison skull on a heap, tying the mass slaughter of the bison and systematic removal of native peoples from their lands, to current continuing trends of rapid redevelopment and displacement of people and animals. Lastly, brightly colored Coyote bones metaphorically link cultural immortality to creativity. Each vessel captures elements of storytelling from ongoing narrative projects in fun and poignant compositions.
Created 2019 in residency at the Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA
Exhibited:
2019 Audubon / RYAN! The Naturalist and The Trickster, Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA