NEIU Library Gallery & Bridge Presents Ryan Tynan: “Inner Child,” Curated by Michael Workman
July 1- Sept. 1
NEIU / Ronald Williams Library
5500 N St Louis Ave.
Chicago, IL 60625
https://www.neiu.edu/neiu-libraries
The first Chicago exhibition for Bridge artistic collective member Ryan Tynan, this survey of the artist’s early work will delve into his work in video art, set design and model-making, and breakthrough work in cinepoetics.
Tynan, the first cinema section editor for the Bridge Journal, identifies as a practitioner in the emerging genre of cinepoetry, a form that has emerged out of the adjacent and related areas of intersectional work such as poetronica, the videopoetry of Tom Konyves and other pioneers such as Gianni Toti and interdisciplinary artists including Eduardo Kac. As a distinct precursor category, Video Poetry developed as an expanded field encompassing installation, performance, new media art and poetics in the works of Gary Hill, Philippe Boisnard, Billy Collins and many others. Today, cinepoetry remains an emerging field, with practitioners including Tynan working to define its contemporary forms.
Tynan’s work, which incorporates elements and objects of childhood play, utilizes dollhouse and the process of dollhouse-making as distinct set piece referents, as well as elements of wishful or magical thinking, utilizing props such as crystal balls, tarot, and the costumery of clowns, baseball and other widely recognizable tropes of youthful play to distill his performances into cinepoetic flash fictions that trace an autobiographical, internal investigation into a childhood self that grows ever more distant as the artist enters a mature early phase of art-making, alongside a genre itself only just now leaving behind its earliest self-definitions and reliances on adjacent or intersecting forms.