5-50 Gallerypresents Showroom Dynasty, a solo exhibition presenting ten new multi-media works from Brooklyn-based artist, Kat Ryals’ Rugs series. Curated by Lauren Hirshfield, the show invites viewers to engage with Ryals’ probing exploration of value, desire, materiality, and cultural hierarchy. She transforms labor-intensive collages of discarded, cheap, artificial and dead objects into sleek textile editions. Each hand-built wall collage is digitally photographed, lightly retouched and reproduced at life-size scale velvet rugs using a commercial dye sublimation print process.
Ryals’ artistic practice sits at the intersection of natural and artificial, trash and treasure, sacred and profane, luxury and kitsch. In the past, horror vacui, or the fear of emptiness, was often employed in art and was considered sacred and highly regarded. Today, minimalism represents refinement and luxury while maximalism is unrefined and cheap. Ryals’ Rugs series highlights the casino floor, the detrital glory of belongings lost, and gambling paraphernalia hidden. The selection of collage materials is informed by the classic iconography of Las Vegas, such as spas, pools, steakhouses, buffets, hotel lobbies, casino floors, and wedding chapels. Ryals incorporates poker chips, playing cards, bra straps, peacock feathers and much more into the shape of a seventeenth century Savonnerie French rug pattern. The resulting image is photographed with a high-resolution camera and printed mechanically onto a velvet rug. What many would consider trash, is transformed to create the illusion of luxury. The rugs reference what is, in today’s fast fashion world, considered unattainable, the opulence of a hand-crafted, hand-woven textile wall hanging or rug.
What has arisen out of American post-capitalism is an aesthetic most notably manifest along the neon streets of Las Vegas. There, as Dave Hickey writes in his work, Air Guitar, is where culture resides - places designed to keep consumers hopelessly spending under the illusion of attaining or becoming something more. Inspired by the gold filigree and ornate environments of a bygone era when luxury was a privilege reserved for a select few, Vegas is mimicry of opulence. In Norman Klein’s The Vatican to Vegas, she puts into conversation these ideas of Baroque ornate aesthetic and the kitsch of Vegas interiors. Both spaces are environments designed to manipulate perception and create a specific emotional response, whether in grand Baroque palaces or the modern casino floor. Caesar’s Palace, for example, is a refuge for those hard-working Americans who put their lives in the hands of the American Dream in the hopes of one day ‘making it big’. For a meager sum, the same American can live like a king for a day, if only he doesn’t look too closely.