Safe Deposit
In the summer of 2008, foreshadowing the economic crisis to follow, a meteorite entered Nashville’s atmosphere and fragmented; the largest recovered piece hit the gold geodesic dome roof of The Regions Bank on Charlotte Pike with St. Ann's Catholic Church narrowly escaping damage. I recovered a 65-gram meteorite shortly following the event. The impacted bank dome suffered no damage except for a small amount of its gold roof impregnated onto the meteorite’s surface. The geodesic is the only man-made structure that becomes proportionally stronger as it increases in size. Currently the meteor is held in a safe deposit box in the Regions Bank vault.
Safe Deposit is a collection of work emerging from this unusual event opening up a vague itinerary from a fragmented story line using metaphor and a synthesis of ideas.
Like many of Jack’s projects media is often produced from a sonic perspective often with sound systems built into the work to create notions of expanded space and new orientations surrounding physicality.
Jack Ryan is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, drawing, programming, sculpture, and sound who lives in the Pacific Northwest. Treating projects as tools of speculation his interests include the experience of understanding, social critique, complicated relationships in contemporary culture, and how we access information. He is the Co-Director of Ditch Projects in Springfield OR and an Associate Professor at the University of Oregon. Jack resided in Nashville for many years teaching at Watkins College of Art and at the School of Visual Arts in NY while concurrently serving as an energetic member of Fugitive Projects in Nashville.
Jack has exhibited work both nationally and internationally in venues such as The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; The Banff Center, Canada; Dublin Electronics Arts Festival, Ireland; Ausstellungsraum Klingental, Switzerland: Maison Laurentine, France; MICA, Baltimore, The Oregon Biennial, Portland; IMAFY, Egypt; Powerhouse, Memphis; University of Tennessee Gallery, Chattanooga; as well as SEED Space and The Frist Center in Nashville.
My work was built in both Iceland and Oregon. This project explores a site of convergence and transgression where land meets sea, where the landscape moves from vertical to horizontal, and associatively between life (verticality) and death (horizontality).