Ry McCullough & Janelle Young Application
ARTIST STATEMENT
O:X:E is an on-going collaboration that brings together images by Janelle Young and writing by Ry McCullough. This project was developed over the last two years by documenting, transcribing and remixing daily conversations of the artists, whom are also married. The resulting text is presented in a form that references a script that would be performed on a stage or an endless thread of text messages. It is a swirling dialogue that addresses the balance between domestic life and existential uncertainty. While examining one reality, the reader is presented with parallel strands of streaming conversations that exist within the experience. Collective as well as singularly isolated, the individual voices serve as a component to the whole sound that in the end creates poetic collisions. The narrative itself involves the characters, O and X. They discuss the fumbling confusion of the everyday, while an ominous column of smoke rises in the distance. A third party named, E, wanders nearby, and under goes a mysterious transformation. The images punctuate the text. Depictions of ambiguous everyday objects are presented as side-by-side positive and negative, suggesting the potential of an alternate or hidden reality.
Right: image example for O:X:E; silkscreen on paper,
32 x 20 in.
SAMPLE TEXT
X: It’s a windshield
O: Is it really…are they pulling our legs
X: Its tracking...I think its going to rain.
O: Did you see the sea fog?
X: no I was stuck inside, but we’ll see how things develop overnight. They say it comes from the deep waters,
moving inland, but its slow going
O: it's pretty mild
X: Ya pretty mild
O: We have seen better days
X: unseen better days
O: That’s not what I said
X: I know. Did you see the officers and all that smoke.
O: the plume?
X: ya I guess, if that’s what you want to call it
O: I mean that is what it was…it inevitable. The signal fires, seems invisible
X: Especially with the sea fog…different than smoke ya know
O: I can hardly tell the difference, these days
X: Its return fire…but it takes years for the light of a star to get to us.
O: reunited...just monitoring the hotspots
X: crow’s feet
O: extensive histories
X: wanna go smoke
REPRESENTATIVE WORK BY EACH ARTIST
for more, go to: ryanmcculloughart.com & janelleyoung.com
