rian kerrane: Housekeeping
november 20, 2024 - march 8, 2025
opening reception | november 20, 2024 – 4:00-7:00 pm
conversation with the artist | february 26, 2025 – 1:00 pm
The art in Rian Kerrane’s exhibition, Housekeeping, emphasizes the effort, accumulation, consumption, and work in housework. The gallery is filled with seemingly random objects: mops and buckets, an umbrella, plastic lids, hair curlers, a light switch, a vent cover, a clutch, or an ironing board. Tying everything together are ephemeral emojis, fashioned into heavy metal brands. Upon closer inspection, everyday throwaway objects have been finely crafted in heavy steel and iron. Kerrane captures and preserves the effects of our lives and relationships through thought-provoking sculptures and language, causing us to consider our own impact on the environment as we navigate the world and society around us.
The gallery is filled with emojis. Emojis are rampant in our digital society. They are small digital symbols used to express an emotion, idea, or attitude, defined in Webster’s Dictionary as “conveyors of information that can succinctly communicate a message playfully without using words.” The artist casts hefty metal brands out of emoji symbols, preserving them in enduring iron. But more than the physicality of the brands, they imply ownership and mark-making. Like branding cattle, Kerrane has branded the ephemeral digital symbols through fire and scorching heat onto paper. Visitors can interact with the branded papers to create words and phrases in the gallery that have meaning in their own lives, causing us to think about the reductive ways the electronic world is affecting language and communication.
Like fleeting emojis, Rian Kerrane emphasizes everyday objects in her sculptures that highlight the role of consumption in modern society. The plastic caps strewn across a finely tasseled rug of plastic bags are from the artist’s home. Collected over fifteen years, these caps and small plastic items cannot be recycled and reflect the guilt of trying to live a responsible life while we are on a constant “treadmill of consumerism.” The rug becomes a landscape surrounding finialed monuments to homes and delicately cast flowers. But in the waste and plastic, the artist also finds beauty and community, saying:
“I see the value in everything I pick up. There is latent value in detritus, but also a history in the inanimate objects. They tell a story of personal relationships and human ingenuity. I like to pay tribute to things by using them. In my system everything is equal.”
Rian Kerrane has invited us into her home and life. The intimacy of sharing objects collected from her drawers; the collected plastic objects leftover from trying to live responsibly in the environment; the monuments to home life in preserved and celebrated domestic objects; and the invitation to create language with her all invite us to make work with Rian. She asks us to pause and reconsider the world we are making. What are our impacts, both in the environment and on people? Who will join us, and what marks will we make on the world around us?
This exhibition is made possible by CU Denver’s College of Arts & Media
About the artist
Rian Kerrane applies cast and fabricated sculpture, site specificity, installation and printmaking as methodologies to examine the critical interconnection between social, environmental and personal themes. Kerrane deliberately incorporates commonplace or industrial objects alongside highbrow traditional art materials. Cultural conformity shifts and evolves, and reflection on the tropes of society sway her interest in upcycling and reuse. For her the studio and gallery are a laboratory for a kind of pseudo-science and a physicalized celebration and critique of late modern culture.
Born in Galway, Ireland, Kerrane received her BA in Fine Arts Degree from the University of Ulster at Belfast she earned her MFA from the University of New Orleans, Louisiana. Currently residing in Denver, Colorado, Kerrane is Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Colorado Denver. Maintaining strong connections to Ireland, she runs a study abroad summer program at the Burren College of Art in County Clare. Her work shows nationally and internationally with exhibitions in Germany, Latvia, Italy, Austria, Mexico and Ireland. Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Columbia, Ukraine, Brazil, Japan, and Wales are some of her far-ranging exhibits with the Artnauts collective.
A board member for the Western Cast Iron Art Alliance since 2008, Kerrane also contributed to curating and steering with the International Conference in Contemporary Cast Iron Art (ICCCIA) in Latvia in 2014, Scranton, Pennsylvania in 2018 and Berlin in 2022.
instagram: @rianannk
Opening reception photos taken by Tomas Bernal