i luv you
Sarah Ryan has made the technique of lenticular photography her trademark. Coating her images with finely ridged plasticised layers she sets up a kind of illusionary three dimensional effect, not unlike a holograph, along with a subtly shifting, sometimes disorienting perspective and a sense of animation which viewers experience as they move in front of the works. Engaging with the lenticular photograph becomes, in fact, something of a physical experience.
Ryan came to particular prominence in Tasmania earlier this year when her large image The Real Escape won the City of Hobart Art Prize, which was staged within the state's first truly international arts festival, Ten Days on the Island. The work features an emptied-out modernist space, eerily unreadable as interior or exterior and given an unsettling significance by the use of the lenticular technology.
Ryan works with a determinedly 'cool ' aesthetic and a pared-down, strangely neutral subject matter. She acknowledges and plays with the pop culture appeal of glossy magazine photography (which she unerringly replicates) and the fashionable minimalism of contemporary design. Her images thus intentionally exploit the familiar visual style of the fashion magazine, at once celebrating and reworking the genre, recognising its frequent vacuousness and making a virtue of it. In her exhibition I Luv You, Ryan has produced a body of work that is not only disturbing, as she subverts and distorts the 'glossy' aesthetic, but is witty, well resolved and original.
In What to Give and Take, a young couple, in a sunlit room, sprawl on bentwood chairs on a pristine white carpet. But for a white door, half-open behind them-and creating a slight sense of edginess- the room is empty. The pair's clothing