rian kerrane: Housekeepinhg
november 20, 2024 - march 8, 2025
opening reception | november 20, 2024 – 4:00-7:00 pm
Rian Kerrane, Pillars of Society
The art in Rian Kerrane’s exhibition, Housekeeping, emphasizes the effort, accumulation, consumption, and work in housework. The gallery is filled with seemingly random objects: mops and buckets, an umbrella, plastic lids, hair curlers, a light switch, a vent cover, a clutch, or an ironing board. Tying everything together are ephemeral emojis, fashioned into heavy metal brands. Upon closer inspection, everyday throwaway objects have been finely crafted in heavy steel and iron. Kerrane captures and preserves the effects of our lives and relationships through thought-provoking sculptures and language, causing us to consider our own impact on the environment as we navigate the world and society around us.
The gallery is filled with emojis. Emojis are rampant in our digital society. They are small digital symbols used to express an emotion, idea, or attitude, defined in Webster’s Dictionary as “conveyors of information that can succinctly communicate a message playfully without using words.” The artist casts hefty metal brands out of emoji symbols, preserving them in enduring iron. But more than the physicality of the brands, they imply ownership and mark-making. Like branding cattle, Kerrane has branded the ephemeral digital symbols through fire and scorching heat onto paper. Visitors can interact with the branded papers to create words and phrases in the gallery that have meaning in their own lives, causing us to think about the reductive ways the electronic world is affecting language and communication.
Like fleeting emojis, Rian Kerrane emphasizes everyday objects in her sculptures that highlight the role of consumption in modern society. The plastic caps strewn across a finely tasseled rug of plastic bags are from the artist’s home. Collected over fifteen years, these caps and small plastic items cannot be recycled and reflect the guilt of trying to live a responsible life while we are on a constant “treadmill of consumerism.” The rug becomes a landscape surrounding finialed monuments to homes and delicately cast flowers. But in the waste and plastic, the artist also finds beauty and community, saying:
“I see the value in everything I pick up. There is latent value in detritus, but also a history in the inanimate objects. They tell a story of personal relationships and human ingenuity. I like to pay tribute to things by using them. In my system everything is equal.”
Rian Kerrane has invited us into her home and life. The intimacy of sharing objects collected from her drawers; the collected plastic objects leftover from trying to live responsibly in the environment; the monuments to home life in preserved and celebrated domestic objects; and the invitation to create language with her all invite us to make work with Rian. She asks us to pause and reconsider the world we are making. What are our impacts, both in the environment and on people? Who will join us, and what marks will we make on the world around us?
This exhibition is made possible by CU Denver’s College of Arts & Media
About the artist
Born in Galway, Ireland in 1968, Rian Kerrane received her BA in Fine Arts Degree from the University of Ulster at Belfast in 1991, her MFA from the University of New Orleans in 1997 and is currently Associate Professor and Area Head for the Sculpture Program at the University of Colorado Denver. A noted sculptor in cast iron, mixed media and installation, Rian has shown in sculpture gardens, museums and galleries in the United States, Ireland, Italy, Austria, and Mexico.
The Traditional Cast Object as Subjective Conceptual Metaphor was presented at the College Art Association Conference in Los Angeles in 2009. She is a board member for the Western Cast Iron Art Alliance, an eclectic group of iron artists that stages biennial iron conferences across the western regions of the United States. Rian is a contributor to the conference steering committee for the 7th International Conference in Contemporary Cast Iron Art in Latvia in 2014 as well as the director for pre-conference workshops.
She was a resident at Flax Art Studio’s International Residency Programme in Belfast in 2002 and Clo Ceardlann, Donegal in 2011. She is a resident artist for the Franconia Sculpture Park Annual Iron Pour this summer in Minnesota. She returns to Ireland each summer, often to the Burren College of Art, where she runs an interdisciplinary, site-specific art course. Rian is the Keynote and a workshop facilitator for IRON-R2 hosted by Crawford College of Art & Design in conjunction with the National Sculpture Factory in Cork, Ireland in April 2014.