Ray Barsante
Bio: Before I am an artist, I am a person in the world. After I am a person, but before being an artist, I look at the world and I like things. I become who I am because of the admiration of and desire to contain qualities that are perceived outside myself. In a sense I am formed by these admirations externally and de-formed from myself.Objects and images are collected as much as they are generated. The objects and images I collect are gleaned from American subcultural ephemera or allude to the esoteric and alchemical. Through a personal taxonomy of collection, the work generates questions through formal abstraction in response to these alternative spheres of culture.I think about ignorance as I accumulate time spent in the world. Ignorance is not a negative attribute. Ignorance is a vast space that births freedom as I float, whereas knowledge is an island on which to rest my feet. There is assuredness in the resting place, but I discover it moving. And the ground can shake and shift, the waves rise up and sometimes swell to cover the island. Dealing with ignorance in the work is to disarticulate what I think I know and re-articulate it into something that might be new. In knowledge the mysterious is flayed and in art it is spoken with.
rwb2136@columbia.edu
Instagram: @raybarsante.files
Thesis Exhibition
L to R: Invoking the Supreme Power of the Goddess (Silkscreen ink, acrylic, wood, nails, and oil on dyed linen, 2023); To Texe, Realm of Fantasy (Pencil, colored pencil, marker, inkjet prints, paper, adhesives, resin, and dandelion stems on wood, 2023); Inner Wizard / Wizard Innards (88.75" x 61" x 7.25", Oil on linen, 2023)
Last image: Crouching Boy (Wood, gesso, tin foil, resin, lavender twigs, glue, and oil on linen, 2023)
First Year Exhibition
L to R: Ravaged By the New Age, ( Oil, 76" x 66", aluminum foil, beeswax and string on linen, 2022); Ravaged By the New Age, Alternate (76" x 66", Oil on linen, 2022)
