There's More to Explore: Up Close and Personal with Ryder Henry

Exhibition continues through June 30.

Ryder Henry is a Pittsburgh based artist whose sculptures and paintings imagine futuristic habitats. Ranging from Earth-based cities to self-contained ring ships for life in outer space, his intricately assembled structures are built using mostly recycled materials. The teetering verticality of city buildings are characterized by their many levels, terraces, and facades, indicating the continual construction and built additions that occur to fulfill the diverse needs of an urban center. In contrast, singular enclosed space ships are autonomous and self-sufficient. The brick towers of Henry's paintings are suburban monoliths stripped of their aesthetic architectural details, but fulsome in their utility for residents who inhabit them.

In each iteration, Henry's structures search for a balance between human integration and isolation in the built environment. His exploration of imaginative architecture is grounded in a consideration for basic human modes of living, which for him, remain essentially unchanged in the future, and are magnified by an ever-increasing population density. From that growth springs an equal and opposite level of fragmentation wherein populations become embedded in their own self-contained local spheres. These futuristic environments objectively investigate possible trajectories of global living and, in doing so, reveal that they are not as far from our lived experience as they first appear.

Henry's exhibition at Hallwalls will feature a selection of paintings as well as a site-specific installation of his sculptural work.

Bio:
Ryder Henry, b.1974 Oxford, UK, Painter and model-builder based in Pittsburgh PA, Focuses on Futuristic landscapes, architecture, and spaceships.

www.ryderhenry.com