Ryan Herberholz: Transient Narratives at Ideation Orange

Work by Ryan Herberholz (BFA ​’12) and Melissa A. Day is featured in Transient Narratives, on view June 5 – 30 at Hazel Park’s Gallery at Ideation Orange. This new exhibition explores landscape, memory, impermanence, and humanity’s evolving relationship with the natural and built environment.

Through layered urban abstractions and otherworldly landscapes, the exhibition reflects on change as the only constant, tracing the remnants of human activity, communication, and environmental transformation across space and time. Ryan’s paintings draw inspiration from Michigan wilderness, Detroit’s North End, and speculative futures that blur the line between the familiar and the uncanny.

Transience describes both the activity of human beings and physical processes. On long enough timescales a building, a city, a single life, or the existence of a species on a planet in a solar system could be considered features of a transient universe. These works attempt to narrate the ineffable. While two differing approaches to landscape are evident in this exhibition they both explore the ways in which human beings interact with their environment and each other. These paintings contain evidence of activity and remnants of communication that divulge the fact that the only constant we can count on is change.

Melissa’s work reflects her fascination with urban landscapes. She finds beauty in the images and textures, on buildings and objects that over time have been altered through the effects of humans and nature. The meaning of these works are irreducible to a single thought or idea. They are as abstract as they are significant. Her collaged works explore unstructured narratives within urban landscapes, blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior spaces. The layering of collage, drawing pencil, acrylic, and oil paint are used to express the transitory nature of urban environments.

Ryan’s landscapes are concerned with the permanence and reality of the natural world and phenomena beyond our human ability to sense. He examines humanity’s relationship to the natural world- in terms of recreation, subsistence, stewardship, and extraction. His vibrant and idyllic vistas often portend of potential calamity- just out of view. Although his works are often based upon the varied landscape of Michigan they attempt to probe forking paths through space and time. He fixes his attention upon the cusp of where human built edifice crumbles into the uncanny. In this realm speculative imaginings become as real as toes wriggling in grass that is much too green.

Transient Narratives
Exhibition Dates: June 5 – 30
Opening Reception: Friday, June 5, 7 – 10 p.m.
Gallery at Ideation Orange, 420 W. 9 Mile Rd., Hazel Park, MI