January 18 - March 13, 2020

Sat 1/18, 4-6 pm: Opening Reception
Sun 2/2, 4-6 pm: The Unraveling - performance by Adrienne Sloane
Sat 2/8, 4-6 pm: Romancing the Square - Cocktail Hour at 13FOREST
Sat 2/22, 4-6 pm: Souvenir - a conversation with Mike Ryczek

For a closer look into the inspiration behind each painting in Fascination Street, read more here.

13FOREST Gallery is pleased to present Fascination Street, an exhibition of new paintings by Mike Ryczek.

Fascination Street, Ryczek's first solo exhibition, introduces a body of work that synthesizes his experience of visiting Seoul, South Korea in 2016. Through his distinctive blend of realism and surrealism, Ryczek compellingly presents the experience of traveling to an unfamiliar country, being overwhelmed by new sights and sensations, and distilling coherent memories from it all.

The impetus behind Ryczek's 10-day trip, his first outside the United States, was his partner's participation in a gathering of Korean adoptees in Seoul, which included her. Prior to their trip, they had had little knowledge of Korean culture, which inspired them to immerse themselves in learning about her country of origin. In Seoul Ryczek and his partner created a visual record of a new culture and their impressions of it by photographing the city and its residents. 

For this series of paintings Ryczek used their photographs as an initial source of imagery. While working on it, however, he also continued learning about Korean history, which enabled him to incorporate new concepts into his work. The final paintings merge a collage of glimpses into everyday life in Seoul with the painter’s attempt to understand another culture more thoroughly. For the painting Decline and Fall, Ryczek began with an unintentional snapshot of a worker taking a smoke break, using the lone figure in an over-stimulating setting to convey the stress of Seoul's workaholic culture. In Minjok, Ryczek takes on the iconic image of a lotus flower, which he had found floating in a pond in a Korean palace. The meditative composition expands upon the well-established symbolism of the flower to examine minjok, a Korean concept of national identity that is both divisive and unifying.

Fascination Street concludes three years of study, imagining and revising by Ryczek. Here he has created a striking and visceral series of paintings that touch upon the experience and memory of foreign travel, which may be familiar to many.  In Ryczek's case, however, it also encapsulates his overwhelming experience of observing another culture as an outsider and leaving it with a desire to know more.

Preview Fascination Street

About the Artist

Mike Ryczek graduated from Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 2006 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration.  He lives and works as a full-time painter and designer in Dedham, Massachusetts. Ryczek’s work was selected for a juried exhibition at the Danforth Art Museum in 2015, and it has been featured in Art Maze Mag and by the Jealous Curator. BOOOOOOOM has twice given Ryczek's work its Editor’s Pick award. Ryczek was interviewed by My Modern Met about his work for Fascination Street; read the full interview here.

I see each of my paintings as a dense collection of layered missteps guided by a single underlying intention. In most of my work, I’m attempting a semi-realistic interpretation of an imagined environment, employing realism and abstraction in a way that gives the impression of a scene on the verge of collapse. The photographic source material I use serves as both a jumping off point and something to fight against. I’m constantly making sure to glean from the source only that which resonates with me and dispose of the rest so as to avoid slavish depiction. The ideal result is a faint echo or a total reconstruction of what is observed, anchored by recurring themes of nostalgia, my own existential anxieties and the corruption of human memory. I view the painting process as a form of self-examination – the end product’s value lying in the thoughts, emotions and memories I’ve projected onto the objective source.