Contemporary art and new sculpture
Ryan Johnson
Born in 1978 in Karachi, Pakistan and now based in New York, Ryan Johnson is emerging as an intriguing new sculptor.
His work, which up until now has consisted mainly of representations of the human figure, uses a variety of techniques and materials: paper attached to rudimentary wire frames, plaster casts, or painted lengths of wooden dowelling (left).
Johnson's representations are unsettling, a fragmented, distorted vision which alternates between black comedy and the sinister.
'Watchmen', his first solo show in New York (2008), debuted some of his most impressive works to date (page bottom). Towering figures with clock faces and object-filled bodies, the specific nature of the watchmen's role is ambiguous. Whether guardians, vigilators, or mythic beings, their spindly, misshapen bodies suggest inertia and atrophy, a sense compounded by the walking aid that protrudes like an extra limb from the clutches of one of Johnson's strange sentinels.
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