|
|
|
|
Artist Exhibitions:
1984: Open Shutter, Taslab
Gallery
1986: Real Life, Walters
Restaurant
1989: Cinderella, A Portrait,
Capers Restaurant
1990: Ongoing exhibit at
Bijoux Jewellery, Hobart.
1991: (18 Dec) Group
exhibition for VERSIONS TWO
book launch at the Long
Gallery, Salamanca Place.
1993: My Beautiful Sister.
Sidespace Gallery 6th-24th
October
1994: Objects ...
Further Information
|
|
Artist Galleries:
Coming Soon!
|
|
Artist Reviews:
Coming Soon!
|
|
Collections:
Coming Soon!
|
|
Commissions:
Coming Soon!
|
|
|
Artist Statement for Tony Ryan
|
|
|
The Preponderance of Women
I think that I always wanted to photograph women for all the usual reasons, but over the last decade I have allowed my models to participate in planning the shoot. This produced the wonderful complexity of two different minds on the same project and got me closest to my ideal of cramming maximum content and associations into an apparently simple composition.
I've tried landscapes, Cartier-Bresson-type street images, even artschool abstracts, but nothing else produced strong images as consistently as my female models.
The imaging of women in art is, of course, enormously problematic - not least because of the enormous weight of thousands of years of male-dominated art. Consciously or unconsciously I quote from that history. At the same time there is a special tension between male photographer and female model which, at least in part, comes from the eternal fascination with the female "other" against decades of feminist debate that has to some extent touched all women.
At the same time images of women persist in our culture (in both art, advertising and popular culture) because they are so powerful and compelling. For instance both men's AND women's magazines have women on the cover. Even women seem to find pictures of other women - be they supermodels or royalty - more interesting than men. The problem is not so much the perception of women as objects of desire but the failure to perceive them as anything ELSE of equal or greater importance.
To deplore this isn't going to make it go away but when feminists use the word "pornography" they tend to mean images that create a false or unrealistic view of women - such as the Playboy imagery that men tend to think are fairly benign. This is a valid point but I believe the solution is not prohibition (which never works anyway) but to create a competing body of images that attempt to show the "real" women that one could reasonably expect to know as friends and/or lovers.
There is also a growing political issue, particularly in the gay community, over the comparative absence of the male nude in our culture. The male penis especially is virtually invisible in popular culture, advertising and all but the most hardcore porn. What we need, to come to terms with our humanity, is not so much feminist art or gay art... but an art that deals evenly with the whole spectrum of human sexuality and thereby an essential part of what it is to be human.
So I don't mind some of my work being called erotic and I don't mind being called a voyeur - but those terms don't really explain anything. Afterall... what makes an image "erotic" when another image, with the same elements in it, is not? Where does that charge that acts on our psyche come from? How does it work? Do men, women, gays and straights ever respond the same way to an erotic image? What, if any, is the relationship between this process and aesthetics?
I hope you find these questions interesting because I certainly do.
Tony Ryan
|
|
contact artist
