With painstaking technique, painterly sensitivity to color and a biting sense of humor, Ryan’s sculpture suggests art’s capacity to both evoke and arrest the passage of time

Taking the form of vintage decorative crafts that have been blown up to an imposing scale, New York-based artist Kathleen Ryan’s (born 1984) Bad Fruit series employs material irony and art historical tropes to play with expectation and desire. Ryan fashions decaying fruit from glittering beads, gemstones and found items, illustrating her fascination with how objects bring meaning and carry a history. Subverting expectations of value, synthetic acrylic and glass beads simulate glistening flesh, while clusters of semiprecious stones play the role of pathogens such as penicillium digitatum. The selection of work in this volume presents Ryan’s fruits alongside other large-scale models of evanescent vegetation, and ignites a sense of disorientation and mythic wonder through its materiality, scale and evocative power. This fully illustrated catalog features essays by Bob Nickas, Shannon Mattern and Heather Davis.