Andrew Ryder-2006

As an art student in the 1970’s I took an interest in the kinetic art of the 1960’s. This included the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel in Paris and the Zero group in Düsseldorf.

The work is about the feeling of tangible experience and our elemental responses to movement and colour. These basic responses carry with them a complex notion of relative judgments. The way light moves over a surface or a breeze travels through a cornfield, the sudden spasm of a deadly fish or the hypnotic coil of a snake. These are the most elementary and primitive of responses. At a deeper level I work with concealment, ambiguity and potential threat.
My use of colour comes from an interest in twilight at the end of a summer day. Perception is in transition between day and night. Our vision becomes more sensitive to blue and green as we increasingly rely upon peripheral vision. As we evolved this was a dangerous time when our perceptions needed to be clear. The precision of day vision fades and only indistinct clues tell us what lurks in the shadows.

The unique ability of the human brain to hypothesize works hard to construct a reliable picture. Today it is mysterious and exciting. It is the time of dreams, imagination and twilight rendezvous. It is the time when the primitive brain works well. Our senses are alive to feelings, smells and subtle sounds.

I employ spatial illusion in which an illuminated, coloured array, pushes forward into space above a contrasting background of ambiguous depth. In previous work the array was comprised of semi-mobile elements of differing lengths. This was set in motion by a series pulses. The perceptual uncertainty was enhanced by the differential rates of movement within the array.

My current my work is static and my interest is in deception, evasion, concealment and confusion within, and beneath the field of illumination.

© Andrew Ryder 2007

Exhibitions at Gallery 286

• 2018
• 2016
• 2015
• 2013
• 2008
• 2006

Images of work from Andrew Ryder’s collection