Gray Contemporary is pleased to present others other, a solo exhibition of new work by Ryan Hawk.
Ryan Hawk’s practice generates instances that signal deep cultural anxieties about the body and its assumed borders. Similar to the way that a horror movie often uses monsters to symbolize confrontation with the “Other”, Hawk’s projects exploit western culture’s history of fear and prejudice towards alterity. By positioning the gaze to the physicality of the body, to its weight of flesh and fluid, his work scrutinizes normative structures of representation and emphasizes a debilitating phobia of the periphery.
In others other, Hawk’s first exhibition with the gallery, frameworks of social ordering are confronted through narratives of horror, tragedy, and dark humor. Spanning video, installation, and sculpture, the works in this exhibition aim to reverse processes of differentiation in order to destabilize phallic masculinity, whiteness, and heterocentric ideologies. The title, others other, is directly emblematic of this strategy: a doubling and reversal of the mirroring processes inherent to making a distinction, the basic act of introducing difference––or perhaps more simply put, a paradox.
Artist:
Ryan Hawk is a visual artist whose practice spans sculpture, video and site-specific installation. His projects draw inspiration from techniques and methodologies found within subcultural practices such as horror, experimental film, and BDSM in order to create alternative corporealities and forms of embodiment. Explicitly engaging representational objectification, Hawk’s work subverts the gaze and viscerally confronts its viewers, challenging them to contemplate how structures of power are upheld and fostered within the dominant cultural and social imagination. Solo presentations have been held at the Lawndale Art Center in Houston; the Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum in Austin; and the Museum of Human Achievement in Austin. His work has been featured in group exhibitions, screenings, and festivals such as Perform Chinatown in Los Angeles; Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn; the Museum of Fine Arts in Nagoya, Japan; and Jonathan Hopson Gallery in Houston. Notable awards include an SMFA Traveling Fellowship for work and research at the Pitch Lake in Trinidad and the Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund from the Dallas Museum of Art. Hawk holds a BFA degree in studio art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an MFA in studio art from the University of Texas at Austin. Ryan Hawk currently resides in Houston, TX where he is a fellow at the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
This exhibition is funded in part by the Houston Arts Alliances’ Support for Individual Artists and Creatives Grant, 2019.
