Chris Ramsay: Meditations in Stillwater

Chris Ramsay: Meditations in Stillwater will feature more than 30 works from the past two decades by artist and OSU professor Chris Ramsay (BFA ​‘83). Collecting souvenirs of the everyday and filling the spaces of his art as if they were the shelves of a living room curio cabinet or storage drawers in a museum of anthropology, Ramsay creates mixed-media sculptures that invite the viewer to look closely at humble traces of time and life: not rare and precious artifacts but rather simple, anonymous objects from marine fossils and flint arrowheads to postcards and Coke bottle shards.

Metaphors for introspection, Ramsay’s sculptures enclose images in tiny chambers illuminated at the touch of a switch or surround scatterings of found objects with the concave walls of colossal bowls. The intimate experience of looking into these works, lingering over details, and reflecting on the multitude of objects that have touched one’s own life elicits the kind of subtle revelation that is all too often left untapped by art today in quest of monumental impressions. Ramsay’s sculptures, in contrast, achieve their ends through unpretentious materials, intimate scale, natural harmonies, and quiet conduciveness to thought.

Chris Ramsay: Meditations in Stillwater
September 15, 2014 to January 17, 2015
Opening reception/​curator talk: Oct. 2
Artist talk: Dec. 4 

Oklahoma State University Museum of Art
Stillwater, OK