'Leisure Time' at Ed. Varie

In the current exhibition at Ed. Varie, Cali native Ryan De La Hoz and Melbourne-born Riley Payne explore the evolving concept of leisure. Masculine and athletic, De La Hoz's sculptures give a nod to Classicism: his works borrow from Greek motifs and update them with a contemporary, gym-class quality. Tether, for example, replicates Polykleitos' famous Diadoumenos but with an electronic jump rope. In the Slab series, cotton square clothes are washed in marble-like dye and stitched with jaded versions of Boy Scout patches. The works are nostalgic for ancient virtues and turn a critical eye toward the present.

Payne's drawings are just as subversive. The labor-intensive detail in his nearly photographic graphite renderings is mind-blowing. The subject matter itself seems modeled after stock imagery (a sun setting over water, a butterfly perched on a leaf). The otherwise banal is then made mesmerizing through his meticulous gradations. With colored pencil, Payne overlays elementary, clay-like doodles onto the imagery, which purposefully undermine the hours of study and work poured into them. But this also creates new meanings: leisure as an act of quiet meditation, where the various elements at play carry more weight than the finished product.

To both De La Hoz and Payne, labor seems inseparable from leisure. In completely different ways, they tease out the virtues and contradictions, both past and present, that attend our free time.

Through August 18, 2013.

ED. VARIE
618 East 9th St.
New York, NY 10009
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