From Erin Cluley Gallery:

"Ryan Goolsby creates geometric sculptures, both free standing and wall mounted, made from common building materials taken from the environment. Through these sculptures, he organizes and amplifies patterns found in nature, such as the concentric or coaxial circles that occur within the wood with which he sculpts. In doing so, the artist experiments with his personal desire to manipulate nature and push it towards near perfection, accompanied by the eventual relent in the face of an unattainable goal.

Goolsby’s work employs both digital technologies and traditional art practices to explore ideas of geometric form and structure in his search for meaning within everyday objects. Influenced by his background in photography, the artist translates his previous mode of making from candid documentation into a kind of recording through object abstraction. Now, instead of photographing his subjects (such as guard rails, radiators, and manhole covers), Goolsby plucks them out of their environment so that he may transform them into something new. Stripped from their context, he then distills the objects into investigative studies of shape and color.

Through abstraction, Goolsby’s subjects open up to possibility, asking to be reimagined as purposeful entities. Becoming emblems, tools of communication, and existential icons, these objects can be interpreted as a form of societal language or as future remnants of contemporary life. Yet at their core they are still stationary items, simply “things” onto which we project our own desire for meaning and reason. This ultimate duality in the work thus echoes one of existence– the push and pull between being something and nothing… between purpose and futility.

CONTROL will be the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery."