It has been too long since I have been to Montreal’s Galerie Rye. It is just as lovely as I remembered it. Galerie Rye’s current show features a solo exhibition of artist Bryan Keith Lanier. Filled with glossy Hercules’s, ships in turmoil, buildings stripped bare and more collaged/graffiti-like pieces, this show features several genres of Lanier’s work and personal iconography.
Raised in a Christian family in America, the image of a dignified, godly figure sporting a curly beard references those idealized men of Greco-Roman origin familiar to Lanier in his childhood. These images are transformed into pop culture icons. Glistening with epoxy, these Hercules’s have leather masks in place of their traditional laurels. In White Rhino Hercules wears a head decoration featuring a rhino horn that protrudes from his forehead. Juxtaposing the confidence intrinsic to this decoration, Hercules’s head hangs in submission. Perhaps this gesture speaks to the struggle every icon has between being a personified object and an objectified subject.
Like Lanier layers his pieces with paper mache, acrylic, and epoxy, each work is rich in layers of souls. While living in Japan, Lanier acquired an interest in the “Shinto” whereby a soul is present in tactile but non-living matter. This is materialized in the glow of colour that is emitted from behind each Hercules. Lanier refers to the Shinto as “emotional radiation,” whereby the spirit of the maker is present in the work. With this in mind, Lanier’s works evoke the spirit of the sculptors of the Hercules sculptures he references, and we as the audience in turn are invited to feel the radiation of Lanier’s spirit. Our own connection to each of these images completes each work.
The second series in Lanier’s exhibition are the White Ships. These ephemeral ships carry an unsettling air of despair. They face the terrors of being pushed to the edge of the world or being swallowed up in its collapse, in a metaphorical sense as opposed to a depiction of Armageddon. In Rogue Waves and Cold Front the waves represent the matters in our lives over which we have no control. Similar to cross-sectioned scientific diagrams, the catastrophic waves that host the ships have been cut laterally so as to expose a limit to each wave, cloud and the universe.
Other works present in this exhibition explore the notion of placing a toy ship in a bottle. Here, however, we see a ship in a light bulb and sailors in a bottle. Lanier succeeds in creating works in which his viewers can existentially try to measure the limits of space. Each container-the bottles, the light bulb, the empty space behind each cross-sectioned wave pattern, reveals mankind’s struggle and inability to measure and contain space beyond Earth.
The limitlessness of space is illustrated in one Hercules piece, HOLYGHOSTFACE. Against a spotted paper mache background, this Hercules turns his face down and away from the viewer. In this act Hercules casts a shadow across half of his face. Alternately, his shadow exposes a continuum of the white spotted marks from the background, revealing these white specs as stars in an infinite space receding into his face. If this makes you intrigued and dizzy, you are sharing your relation to such existential thoughts with the artist.
These shiny Hercules’s expose the fatigue and exhaustion of pop icons, mirroring the struggles the White Ships undergo while they simultaneously reign over the gallery to inspire hope amongst our inability to bear the unknown and loss of control in such waves.
I’d like to thank artist Bryan Keith Lanier again for speaking with me about his work and sharing his very beautiful remarks regarding his experience with each piece.
Bryan Keith Lanier's solo exhibition runs till February 6th.
Bryan Keith Lanier: http://bryankeithlanier.blogspot.com/
Galerie Rye: http://www.galerierye.com
