Reveries With The Line: Masha Ryskin

Ryskin uses unique materials such as tea bags, recycled fabric, or coffee to record fragments of life and experience in her installations, drawings, paintings, and prints. Art critic Arthur Whitman refers to Ryskin's work as experimental, that which "crosses media and genre with an exploratory but disciplined sensibility." Her "fragments-made-whole sensibility" combined with her sewn together "scraps" suggest the human attempt to piece together fragments of memories. Loose threads add dimension to her highly textural surfaces implying an unraveling of historical experience. Neutral colors cast the eye on rich texture as the fluidity of movement stems from her brilliant control and quality of line. Vast areas of space intone silence, offering breathing room for the viewer before getting immersed, once again, in the linear integrations elsewhere in the composition.

Having emigrated from Russia, Ryskin's work focuses on a sense of place. By exploring the linear elements of the landscape, everyday rituals, and commonplace activities, Ryskin retains a source of material to assimilate her expressions of memory, the passage of time, and personal experience living
and studying art under communistic rule. These elements of personal history taught Ryskin acute observational skills. Ryskin writes that her work "directs attention to footprints, stains, and other overlooked elements that speak of the temporal quality of the human experience."

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website