Tristram Lansdowne and Ryan Crowley: Wicked Wells + Window Wipeouts

Tristram Lansdowne and Ryan Crowley: Wicked Wells + Window Wipeouts
On view: October 4, 2025–January 25, 2026
Opening reception: Saturday, October 4, 6:00-9:00 pm

Tristram Lansdowne’s practice is focused on how representational space is deployed in various fields including painting, landscape and architecture. A deep focus on watercolor painting anchors his practice which extends to sculpture, installation and printmaking. He holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2016) and a BFA from the Ontario College of Art & Design (2007). Recent exhibitions include Luis De Jesus Los Angeles; CHART Gallery, NYC, New Art Projects, London, and Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides, Quebec. He was a 2024-25 fellow at the Roswell Artist in Residence Program, in Roswell NM.

At the core of Ryan Crowley’s sculpture practice is the notion that objects are structural worlds that demand movement and visual spelunking. While considering how objects in the round resist fast consumption Crowley likens the less accessible zones of his sculptures to back alley ways. Sometimes the whole sculpture is a stage to allow for something to be mostly hidden from view. He holds an MFA from the Sculpture and Extended Media Department at Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Sculpture from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. National exhibitions include Hometown Gallery, Coustofwaxman, Wayfarer’s Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), TSA Chicago, Julius Caesar (Chicago), Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX), La Montagne Gallery, 4th Wall Project (Boston), 1708 Gallery, Sediment Arts and Reference Gallery (Richmond, VA)

(Well, What is a Wicked Well? Where one wipes out?)

The idea for this exhibition emerged over the course of several months of studio visits and informal conversations which often orbited around questions of process, of language, how subject is formed or avoided and how to arrive at something that surprises. These recent sculptures and paintings whose subjects are gathered from the visual experiences of our everyday travels call to mind the image of a scrapper’s overloaded truck.

Collecting, indexing and reconstituting material, this “scrapping” allows for a level of play, for shaping subjects into new forms that are slightly unstable, surprising and unknown. Lansdowne works toward meticulously rendered watercolor paintings by way of small intuitive drawings of overlapping images. Composed almost entirely of framing devices, a multitude of combinations are worked through in pursuit of new relationships between surface and depth. Crowley’s sculptures are actively shifting blueprints where the model and object become indistinguishable underneath crusts of process histories. The object is a site, like a ruin under construction where the scaffolding and architecture have fused into an ancient infant.

This shared insistence on indirectness, on blurring the lines between subject and object, is often guided by a keen attention to texture and surface. For Lansdowne, the textures and sculptural qualities of everyday subjects guide the development of pictorial tensions. A dilapidated house might be the catalyst for a process of visual stretching, compressing or extracting, to shift the ordinary form into an unsettling gesture. For Crowley, objects and their surfaces are grounds where language circulates but won’t stick. There is associative slippage in things. An object might appear familiar but is soon only describable through its likenesses to other things.

Imagine a small fissure in a large wall. A light beams through this crack. In Wicked Wells and Window Wipeouts, we are presented with a series of voids – portals whose frames and surrounding architecture draw us in for a closer inspection.