Ryan Standfest - Featured Artist Profile

I have been friends with Ryan for around 7 years, and we used to have intense arguments during the weekly painting department workshops at the University of Iowa. He has, as long as I have known him, exerted a strange intensity. I like and respect Ryan, and I am pleased to present a selection of his work and an artist's statement written specifically for Ink Stained Hands:


I’ve returned to making prints recently, after a three-year hiatus. I don't even know if would call myself a printmaker. It's one tool in a toolbox full of options. But I must say, on a purely elemental level, I love the act of making a print. I love the printshop - the presses, the hotplates, the inking slabs, and especially the acid room. Maybe I like these environments because they carry with them a certain mood, a speed of creation that is a little slower, a space filled with deliberate processes. In this way, a printshop reminds me of the workspaces glimpsed in my youth-- the benches in my grandfather's garage or in his basement, the Detroit automobile plant my father worked in. It is a shop-- a laboratory, a factory, a set-up to join thought with action, to think out loud. I love the rich smell of printing inks, the scent of rosin baking onto a plate. I love the idea of fusing an image with a sheet of paper by forcing it through a piece of heavy machinery-- a contradictory pas de deux between the ephemeral and the permanent, irrational thought and rational industry. I enjoy the process for it's ability to join with my state of mind when called for, but could just as easily find release in another medium on another day. Although a shop is often by it's very nature a communal setting, I usually feel outside of the printmaking tribe-- as my greatest joy is being completely alone in a printshop, at night, very late at night, with music, coffee, ideas, and the occasional break to smoke a pipe. Ideal conditions for a process akin to an alchemical act of projecting internal images lodged in the deepest recesses of the gut, out into the tangible world.

It is the process of making light of the troubling pollutants I call rot, in an act of polite transgression. In my recent work, I have been exploring what I might term spiritual pollution. I have devised the notion of the spiritual as a kind of universal glue, a viscous binding agent connecting all living things. This glue accepts, and pulls into it all notions of identity into a singular body, a unified consciousness. But in the midst of this universal glue, is a corrosive element, a pollutant or solvent hovering about and raining down a substance that dissolves the glue. Specifically, this cloud of corrosion is the airborne byproduct issuing forth from factories mass-producing psychological trauma (perhaps Blake's dark satanic mills, would be appropriate here). It is the interface of the glue and the pollutant, the dissolution that is wrought, that I make reference to in my work as rot. Print seems to embody certain metaphorical possibilities in exploring such a concept through the use of acid and thick, black ink and the fixation onto paper of images of dissolution.

I am currently developing a number of print suites that will eventually be collected in little crates that I plan to construct. These prints are a further exploration of themes set down in a recent mixed-media triptych titled The First Revelation of the Shed Builder, Concerning the Mountain and the House. The Shed Builder is the newest in a number of personas that I have manifested for myself, in order to craft a personal mythology by which I can negotiate/navigate psychological terrain. The most direct series relating to the triptych, From the Shed Builder Illuminations (which The Sexual Clumsiness of God is a part of), illustrates concepts alluded to within the triptych, thereby expanding the work. The other print suites include: Six Shed Collections, illustrating the contents of a complex of structures created by the Shed Builder, Stumblebum’s Progress (which includes SIXWOUNDEDMENASONEMAKINGACLOUD), a response to recent emotional crisis I found myself gripped by as I moved to New York City and then back to my hometown of Detroit, and a series of collagraphs, Clouds and Figures, or Keep Watching the Skies, which seems a straightforward presentation of external threats from a child-like perspective. A recent approach I have taken with these works, has been to treat the images in a rougher manner, to seek out a wounded and earthy quality that can result from working with materials in a slightly-cruder, less controlled fashion. Letting acid bite an etching plate a little longer, or making thick, deeply embossed and sludge-like collagraphs speaks to this. In fact, at the very bottom of each of the Clouds and Figures prints, I am painting a thin strip of heavy tar. Although there is quite a bit of control in my image-making process, with highly deliberate, almost diagrammatic compositions, I am thrilled by the seeping-in of simplicity and crudeness.

Additional work can be viewed at http://www.ryanstandfest.com/