1878 & Brown Foundation Galleries
August 28 – November 14, 2021
ArtWalk Reception - Saturday, August 28, 2021
6 – 9 PM
This exhibition is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Commission on the Arts.
Ryan Hawk
distorts of trespass
Ryan Hawk’s exhibition distorts of trespass showcases the artist’s continued analysis of masculinity and whiteness within both popular and sub-cultural modes of expression. Intentionally manipulating the common judicial term “torts of trespass,” the exhibition’s title serves to mirror the complex and contradictory forms of expropriation addressed in his work.
Central to the exhibition is Hawk’s 2019 film installation Untitled (blue), in which a 1958 heartache-ballad-turned-millennial-pop song is taken to score a mock horror narrative that scrutinizes traditional representations of engendered emotional capacities. Recent sculptures in silicone will also be displayed, such as tattooed ‘flesh-objects’ that confront appropriations of marginality and dispossession as well as abnormally long appendages that disorder subversive performances of power and privilege.
Spanning many mediums and approaches, Hawk exhibits in distorts of trespass an invitation to transverse the borders of our collective imagination and recognize the mechanics of fear that uphold systems of domination and oppression.
Ryan Hawk is an artist and scholar working with video, sculpture, and site-specific installation to imagine alternative corporealities and forms of embodiment. Either through filmic character studies that satirize notions of universal self-determination or sculptural ‘flesh-objects’ that confront sub-cultural expressions of power and privilege, Hawk’s projects disorder the symbolic and material conditioning of white, cis-heteropatriarchy. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at Gray Contemporary, Lawndale Art Center, The Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum, and The Museum of Human Achievement. His work has also been included in group exhibitions, screenings, and festivals such as Perform Chinatown, Los Angeles; Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn; the Museum of Fine Arts, Nagoya; Jonathan Hopson Gallery, Houston; and many more. Hawk’s work will be included in the forthcoming 2021 Texas Biennial: A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon, co‑organized by curators and artistic directors Ryan N. Dennis and Evan Garza in collaboration with Max Fields of Fotofest International. Notable awards include an SMFA Traveling Fellowship, The Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund from the Dallas Museum of Art, and a two-year fellowship with the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Hawk holds a BFA in studio art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an MFA in studio art from the University of Texas at Austin.
