Ryan Foley
Dream Team 1992, Canvas on polo shirts, 108 x 196 inches, 2011
Johnny 99, Mixed-media collage on loose leaf, 9 x 18 inches, 2011
Aritst Statement
When he was younger, Ryan Foley wanted to be either in the NBA or work as a Disney animator. These childhood aspirations are reflected in his work, but they are coupled with a grittiness that prevents them from devolving into sentimental nostalgia. The use of found materials—old golf t-shifts hanging limp with the Dream Team’s numbers painted on them—creates for the viewer a scene where once heroic figures of childhood confront the inevitability of their deterioration. But whimsy and humor are not absent from the scene that Foley creates. Foley's drawing of Donald Duck double-fisting two beers with a grin on his face and Popeye sized forearms indulges the viewer in the lighter side of reminiscence.
Foley notes that a phrase central to his current work is: “Economy of means, density of meaning.” The images Foley employs are loaded, but his manipulation of these images destabilizes the familiar, comfortable associations one might have with them. He is unafraid to tear memories from the annals of childhood and put them into contact with the raw, unedited and stripped down materials he works with. While Foley is not interested in telling the viewer how to remember, he does blaze a path for one to revisit, on his own terms, the subject of memory. – Juliana Rausch