Ryan Gander
But it was all green
10 Oct — 13 Dec 2003

STORE is proud to present Ryan Gander’s exhibition, ‘But it was all green’. Born in 1976 in Chester, Gander has studied at the Jan Van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Earlier this year he won the Prix de Rome in the Netherlands. This is his first solo exhibition to take place in London.

Gander’s practice is multifaceted, ranging from installation, sculpture, intervention, writing, performative lecturing through to being the manager of two bands, one fictional, one actual. Much of his work is concerned with tweaking common objects, situations or systems, and planting his own often inexplicable narratives within them. Names of characters such as Marie Aurore and Abbé Faria crop up in partially told stories that never resolve. Together his works constitute a series of off-cuts, footnotes, by-products and marginal scribbles — a sort of vernacular aesthetics embedded in everyday systems. For his show at STORE, Gander has produced ‘But it was all green’, an installation that incorporates a black flip-dot display which contains yellow neon dots — the type usually seen at bus stations providing information of destinations. Gander’s flip-dot display does not function as expected, and instead the promised messages never quite appear. The display seems broken, or even perhaps to have a life of its own. The environment that Gander has created around the display seems enclosing and even comforting, yet it withholds any definite statement or positive indication of what might be going on. ‘But it was all green’ offers the viewer the experience of an ongoing lack of meaning, with a vague promise that something might eventually come along.

26/07/02
Woke early. Drove from London to a factory just outside Brighton called Hanover Displays where I met a guy called Alan, who I’d been in contact with for a few months. He showed me around the building, then found some damaged stock which he said I could have for free. One sign had been in a flood, and although it was dirty there was nothing actually wrong with it as all the components were waterproofed… The day before the factory had flooded, the sign had been tested and its magnets had not been reset. Later I found out the software didn’t work, so I’m stuck with the last test destination: Route 670, Yuen Hang Liang Ping.
— Ryan Gander, ‘Appendix’ (Artimo Publications, 2003)

More on Ryan Gander