There is more than meets the eye to the 10 ornate-looking rugs from Kat Ryals’s “Rug” series for the Brooklyn artist’s first solo show with 5-50. Each work is actually a large multimedia collage, the ornate pattern of a 17th-century Savonnerie French rug created using a variety of both natural and artificial objects, including poker chips and other gambling paraphernalia. Ryals then takes high-resolution photographs of these labor-intensive tableaux, printing them at life-scale on velvet rugs using a commercial dye sublimation print process. The result is the illusion of luxury, an image of various detritus masquerading as a hand-woven textile, much as a Las Vegas casino apes the opulence of the baroque, while promising visitors a shot at capturing such wealth for themselves.
5-50 Gallery is located at 5-50 51st Avenue, Long Island City, New York.
—Sarah Cascone
