LIZA RYAN     

New Work: Video and Photographs

September 20 through November 8, 2008

GRIFFIN is pleased to present a new exhibition of video and photographs by Liza Ryan. This will be Ryan's eighth exhibition at GRIFFIN. Recently her work was included in the Sydney Biennial where she was chosen as one of only four American artists. She has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Reed College's Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery in Portland, Oregon. A catalog will accompany the exhibition. In addition, GRIFFIN Editions recently published an 84-page hardcover book on Ryan's work.

Inspired by J.A. Baker's book, The Peregrine, Ryan's new work takes concepts of motion, transformation and release and examines them with the same lyricism imbued in Baker's classic text. Birds have been a recurrent theme in Ryan's work and in this exhibition hawks and falcons become central images as manifestations of complex, often contradictory ideas of soul, grace, power and ruthlessness. For Ryan, they embody a particular kind of freedom, implicit in their unfettered movement, and symbolize a desire to gain freedom from bodily, societal, and gravitational restraints of the human domain. These ideas are explored in Invisibility Experiments, a video installation in which the absence of boundaries and mutability of form reach their ultimate climax: disappearance.

Ryan's work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Maison Européen de la Photographies, Paris, among others. Ryan lives and works in Los Angeles.

Link to Current Exhibition Checklist