Ryan Valentine

These images are little jokes, to me. They describe a relation between the simulation of reality and reality (See Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation and edit out the nonsense as you see fit. You can find a full .pdf online.). Truly they don't really do that. They're little exercises in an idea from which you can possibly draw another idea—that much of what we experience is falsified, often for entertainment purposes or monetary gain. Or perhaps unknowingly. Does a woman in a film noir film smoking a cigarette describe the sexiness and rebellion of the act or does it create it? Never mind the fear of female sexuality contained within much of film noir. It's not relevant to my current argument. I suppose the question is: what portions of fiction and fact are descriptive and what are prescriptive?

Really, though, these images are just ink on paper and you can ignore most of the above. I enjoy the precision of the printing and cutting and gluing. The colors and scale are banal, which I think is fun. The wood grain is real, mostly. And sometimes you won't be able to find, for sure, where the wood grain is fake, where it doesn't belong, and where it has insinuated itself into other combinations of falsification. The titles are empty spaces, which can be filled by the viewer. I ripped two of them off from Bertrand Russell so I think that it's fitting that you do with them as you please.

Finally, I have a soft spot for modernist abstraction. It is not in their relation to reality but rather that they can be argued to be things in and of themselves that is interesting. This is especially relevant when we are talking, vaguely, about insinuated fictions within a physical object.