Ended
Ryan McLaughlin
Saline Cache
Sep 21 – Nov 4, 2023
Laurel Gitlen is thrilled to present Saline Cache, an exhibition of new paintings by Ryan McLaughlin, the artist's first solo exhibition in New York since 2013.
Smudged with distance and atmosphere, the trees dress each mountain in solid color from holler to plateau. Here, in the forest grown up around the homestead, they become particular—Osage orange, locust, persimmon, oak—and they obscure the view. September has cooled the air.
The underground spring wets the clay where it always used to, and a yellow warbler flies from shade to shade. As it crosses the naked path it flashes like a strobe. Follow the bobcat trail to the wagon road once further civilized by pickup
trucks—
Lonely Arturo is cleaning up a place. He hitches a rotted trailer house to his midcentury tractor—he'll pull it to the ravine and dump it. Dragged over rocks, swaying, the house is again inhabited: Curtains slide open and the screen door bangs.
Follow the settlers' stone fences, follow the abandoned farmlets strewn end to end with aluminum cans and the obsolete chargers to generations of phones. By the road is a family cemetery and a headstone for a baby who died at two weeks in 1901 and was designated infant, which is a beautiful name.
A return at dusk—insects bump the solar lantern and keen in the further dark. Home. In the barn are boxes of love letters and a doe bedded in a stall. Across the holler, up the mountain, Arturo's cattle bawl and bawl.
—Darcy Courteau
Ryan McLaughlin (b. Worcester, MA) received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Recent solo exhibitions include Calcium Hat, Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; Säntis Bindle, Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; Impreza Earth, David Petersen Gallery, Minneapolis, MN; Traffiq, Laura Bartlett Gallery, London; Lacus PM, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; and Raisins, Laurel Gitlen, New York. McLaughlin's work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at Metro Pictures, Sperone Westwater, Sikkema Jenkins and Thomas Erben, New York; Tanya Leighton, Berlin; Off Vendome, Dusseldorf.
