Sep 6th 2013

Ryan Duggan: Low-Dose No-Doz

@ Johalla Projects

1821 W. Hubbard St., Suite 209

Opening Friday, September 6th, from 7PM - 10PM

On view through Monday, September 30th

Johalla Projects is very excited to announce Ryan Duggan: Low-Dose No-Doz, its second solo exhibition with Chicago-based artist Ryan Duggan. The exhibition will run from SEPTEMBER 6 to SEPTEMBER 30. Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, September 6 from 7-10pm.

Ryan Duggan’s work is keenly informed by the oddity of the everyday. Often fueled by his appreciation of signage and text, Duggan utilizes advertising strategies to subvert a traditionally informative message into something more intriguing or surprising. In this sense, Duggan challenges notions of purpose in visual communication and suggests an alternative way of “looking.”

For Low-Dose No-Doz, Duggan’s new works are simple yet bold, employing imagery and language that weave a common thread of confusion, depravity, and disinterest. In some moments, his seemingly spliced phrases tinker on the edge of absurdity, forcing the viewer to create his or her own unreasonable narrative in response. This approach, paired with Duggan’s stylistic typographical choices, hearkens to artists like Ed Ruscha, whose characteristic deadpan representations mask more complex issues or ideas.

In a more physical context, Duggan’s methods of making become highly visible – balancing between production-based sign making, traditional approaches to painting, and transformed found objects or sculptures. This melding of materials further disassociates the immediacy of advertisement-based language from its conventional form while simultaneously projecting a bizarre sense of nostalgia for a less-complicated era of communication.

RYAN DUGGAN is an artist and printmaker working in Chicago, Illinois. His work spans a number of mediums but carries a common tonality and visual aesthetic culled from American advertising, design, and signage. Duggan studied advertising in college and currently splits his time between making art and screen-printing under the moniker Drug Factory Press.

For more information, please contact Anna Cerniglia at johallaprojects@gmail.com.

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