Captivated by social mores and formalities as they relate to the objects we surround ourselves with, Alyse Ronayne (Chupadero, NM) draws from an adept interest in art, design, and social history when approaching sculpture and installation methods. The largest work in the exhibition, Untitled (Floorscape for stm), is part of an ongoing, site-specific series in which the artist uses industrial rebond material to outline and visually shift the dimensions of the gallery’s floorprint.

Also shown in the gallery are new paintings and wool works, exploring the artist’s continued themes of pattern, symbol and material. This is the first time Ronayne has exhibited wall works made of tufted wool, a material she regularly uses at her day job making rugs. Many of the paintings incorporate interference paint, giving their surfaces qualities more subversive than image-based artworks traditionally inhabit. Three of these works are hung on person-sized plinths, which create intimate viewing experiences in an otherwise open gallery space. 

The rebond padding of the Floorscape work is a construction substrate - a material generally not visible in the final built product. Ronayne is not exactly exposing this material so much as not covering it, an effort to have the subject communicate in a raw manner. The directness of the material establishes the artwork as more of a site-specific gesture, not necessarily as a settled, worked object. Similarly, the phrasal template “Long live —” is an idiom, a gesture of language that is peculiar to itself in having a meaning that cannot be derived from the conjoined meaning of its elements. 

The artist’s background in sculpture has trained her to consider objects from many perspectives, spatially and conceptually. There is a wavering push and pull to Ronayne's work, perhaps because the themes at the heart of her inquiry are so intimate. The artist elegantly manipulates space in and around her artworks to alternately alienate or seduce, to hide or disclose. 

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Alyse Ronayne earned her MFA from Bard College, and currently lives and works in northern New Mexico.

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