Ryan Mrozowski »Eagle or Sun?«

Mexico City, September 07, 2021 - October 16, 2021

Galerie Nordenhake presents the third solo exhibition by artist Ryan Mrozowski and his first show in Mexico. Eagle or Sun? comprises a series of paintings, photographs, and an animated video that speculate with spoken language, partial meaning, and binomial distances within visual experience. In them, the viewer is constantly switching signs and navigating frictions, similar to the experience of reading a two-sided message or trying to view two sides of a coin simultaneously.

The exhibition’s title takes from the book Eagle or Sun? by Mexican poet Octavio Paz, a prose about the crossroads between the other and the unheard of. The text is distinguished by its freedom, where words gravitate away from form, as they do in Mrozowki’s acrylic paintings of botanical elements obfuscated by scattered text. The viewer’s moving gaze stirs a desire to join the letters and decipher an apparent hidden message, while their random distribution reveals organized words amid the tension between reading and looking.

Untitled (An open moth, a torn mouth) is an animation depicting two entangled visual natures: a moth with spread wings and a torn void. Mrozowski is interested in the slippery nature of language articulated in sounds, and the balance between representation and abstraction. With this in mind, the movement resulting from torn holes on black paper may equally represent the fluttering of an insect and an opening mouth, as it could also depict a torn sheet.

Untitled (Field) depicts a set of undulating flowers, aligned with a grid of polka dots that can be read as punctuation marks overlaying the pistils. This work requires the viewer’s eye to focus alternately between background and foreground. The flowerbed patterns’ contours reminisce those of the moth’s wings, as excised from the animation.

All the works attempt some balance between abstraction and depiction. As in Paz’ writing, Mrozowski is wrestling with the moment when image becomes settled and legible. The artist's interest in destabilizing perception by establishing competing paths for the eye, is equally manifest in the prose of Eagle or Sun? The gaze, in its wandering from sign to sign, traces a path that can only be traveled by whoever sets out to walk it: to begin and begin again.

press-text-spanish

Play Video