The Basement Gallery
: : J U N E   2 0 0 7 : :
            
 
Ryan Mulligan & Sarah Hollis

Opening Reception Friday, June 1st from 5-10PM.  Exhibition hours continue thru Saturday, June 23rd

The Basement Gallery is proud to present the drastically playful drawings and installations of Sarah Hollis and Ryan Mulligan. Both artists are extremely interested in the daily practice of journaling and self-musing but formally approach the content and materials in extremely different ways. Hollis has developed a body of work by obsessively scanning every page out of blank sketchbooks and then journaling on the color printouts in sequence. By removing the hand held quality of working in a journal she deals with the new object-ness of the digital print while maintaining the page-to-page relationships a narrative implies. Delicately crafted drawings merge with continually agitated and mildly depressed banter in a knowing push pull of maker and audience.

In contrast Mulligan’s site variable installations form a ridiculously humorous narrative about a space journey gone wrong. The works reside somewhere between wonderfully poorly crafted drawings that are extremely personal and sad objects that are universally recognizable. Using painted found materials from an abandoned hospital, drawings, cartoons, clipboards, and word panel paintings Mulligan exaggerates the story into a psychological realm dealing with his father’s mortality. To quote Mulligan, “I paint about Wookie Mcnuggets and spaceships going to asteroids ruled by Steve Martin to not have to deal with death, but deal with micro problems on the surface of the work.”

Both artists are located in Cincinnati, Hollis just received her MFA and Mulligan teaches at the University of Cincinnati and holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University.