PHILADELPHIA - Tiger Strikes Asteroid is pleased to announce the opening of its March exhibition, see the man walking, a solo exhibit by Ryan McCartney.

The title of the show is a reference to a childhood game of sorts. The full phrasing was typically,”see the man? see the field? see the man walking in the field?”; the sight being seen was agricultural rows in fields seen through a car window. When these rows are perpendicular to a roads surface, they approach and recede according to perspective, and are said to appear as walking legs. As a child, the artist could not generalize the passing of these rows into the idea of a man.
The experience of seeing precluded the metaphor.

Ryan McCartney’s current work exists primarily as painting; however, most of these works are not on canvas, but rather constructed from wood. Traditional painterly elements, such as line, texture, and shape are largely determined by cutting, drilling or gouging into the wooden surfaces with common woodworking tools. The result is a very low relief that registers the small fluctuations of a built surface. Color is added and subtracted through layering and sanding, to enhance or negate texture, and raw wood itself is often used as a color. The presence of enhanced or altered grain patterns contrasted with raw materials initiates a sort of reverse trompe l’oeil, where materials are made into images of themselves.

From the accompanying essay by Arda Collins:
“Materiality and color are event: A person perceiving a faunal echo in changing barometric pressure; determining the proximity of sound waves in stillness; apprehension, memory, systems of organs shot with holes made by thought, velocity, emptiness; gravity lilts over forms and sensation; a being exerts an intimate gesture or question.”

Ryan McCartney received his MFA from Tyler School of Art, and received his BFA from the Cooper Union. His work has been exhibited at the Thomas Erben Gallery in New York, the Greenstone Gallery in Lincoln, UK, and numerous venues in Philadelphia including the Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Jenny Jaskey Gallery in Philadelphia, and Vox Populi Gallery. McCartney currently lives and works in Philadelphia.