Ryan Sluggett

Slugget is interested in staging pictures which are close to but not exactly within any given genre: such as “near” landscapes, near portraits, and near still lifes. In his work he indicates various proximities to “daylight” reality and to its subconscious counterpart. The painting Girls on Carpet oscillates physically between the presence of the gestural and the removal of the hand through the transferred and traced image. Line is important in both a lyrical and structural sense to the moment enacted in the work.

Ryan Sluggett is an emerging artist who is currently completing an MFA in painting at UCLA. Born in Calgary, Alberta, he majored in painting at the Alberta College of Art and Design, completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction in 2003. Sluggett’s paintings, often figurative engage a range of styles from early twentieth-century Modernist portraiture. In Sluggett’s work disguised Cubist corpses are invaded by a plethora of voices and fractured identities: culture critic, romantic revolutionary, poolside beauty à la Reginald Marsh, innocent poet/victim and various artist alter egos. Sluggett’s work came to national attention in 2004 with the solo show On Posturing at the Art Gallery of Calgary curated by Eric Cameron. Sluggett has an active exhibition career with solo and group shows in Calgary, Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal . Also working in animation, Sluggett’s third film entitled Tyranny, was recently featured in the 2007 La Biennale de Montréal: Crack the Sky, curated by Wayne Baerwaldt. His drawings were recently included in the group exhibition, There are those drawings by six artists, at the Contemporary Art Gallery. Sluggett is represented by TrepanierBaer Gallery in Calgary.