A Discussion with Ryan Sluggett and a special screening of his recent 2020 animation film, Ed Terrestrial
Thursday, October 21
5:30pm - 7:00pm
Of Ed Terrestrial, Jackson Arn, the American critic, has written:
“It’s never easy to make art that’s deliberately, self-consciously “about” society; to fail is to invite ridicule, and sometimes to succeed is to invite even more. The difficulty of the problem has led too many artists and critics to conclude that it’s pointless to try—a hedged, managerial sort of conclusion… I’ll say this much: for Ed Terrestrial, [Sluggett has] developed a style of animation that exposes the malevolence lurking beneath cozy, infantilizing entertainment; the sludge lurking beneath “good taste”; and the queasy cocktail of interest and disinterest that we’ve all been drinking—and anyone who doesn’t see the urgency of making art about these things has been living in a cave.”
Ryan Sluggett, Ed Terrestrial, 2020 (film still). Courtesy of the artist and TrépanierBaer Gallery.
Biography
Ryan Sluggett was born in 1981 in Calgary, Alberta. He received his BFA with Distinction in Painting from the Alberta College of Art + Design in 2003, and his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2011.
Ryan Sluggett has had nine solo exhibitions at TrépanierBaer Gallery; the most recent titled The Ego and the Ed (2021). Selected group exhibitions of note include: Summer Bomb Pop: Collections in Dialogue, Tang Museum, New York (2021); Everywhere You Are, Contemporary Calgary (2020/21); Out of Sight: New Acquisitions, Vancouver Art Gallery (2014); and Made in LA., the Hammer Museum Biennial (2012).
Sluggett has successfully completed numerous commissions. In 2013, he completed a major commission for the Ivey School of Business at Western Ontario University in London, Ontario. This large multi-paneled work is comprised of three panels measuring 8 feet by 8 feet each, for an overall dimension of 8 feet by 24 feet. In 2015, Sluggett completed a commission for a major video piece for a private collector in the United States; and he has recently completed a painting commission for a Canadian collector.
Sluggett’s work is included in numerous public collections including the Booth Collection at the University of Chicago; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Vancouver Art Gallery; Glenbow Museum, Calgary; the Rubell Collection, Florida; the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Collection, Edmonton; and numerous private and corporate collections throughout Canada and the US.