Santa Barbara, CA - My Pet Ram is pleased to present Windward featuring new work by Ida Badal and Ryan Nord Kitchen.

Attempting to visualize meaningful experiences is never completely fruitful, but the journey toward making known the physical and emotional actions of the past can result in a deeper understanding than pure representation ever could. Through abstraction, both Ida Badal and Ryan Nord Kitchen investigate the natural world and our relationship with it on various levels that allow for a deeper connection with the materials and process each employs.

Removed from the purely representational, Ryan Nord Kitchen seeks meaning in the landscape through a discrete questioning of visual language. Emphasizing the texture of oil on canvas, their slim gestures of color within a wider monochromatic field allude to various terrain and environments without making explicit references. Striking a balance between a more meditative experience of abstract painting and the artist stymying a direct reading, Kitchen’s work beckons for further examination.

Ida Badal leverages a duality in her paintings that tricks the eye into seeing atomic surfaces and distant stars in the same view. Patterns form in dots and strokes that investigate the depth of field held in traditional painting while visually referring to photographic bokeh and electronic microscopy. Referring to natural cycles and time passing, Badal creates a hybrid space where psychological states and bits of memory combine with adept handling of textural patterns and pristine surfaces.

By rooting themselves in an observation of the real world and extrapolating outward, both Badal and Kitchen ask the viewer to peer through their eyes and question the ways in which we perceive. How do we take our day-to-day for granted? Should we not pause for reflection and reassess what is directly before us? Slowing down, unfocusing our eyes, the world becomes a bit more clear.

Windward will be on view beginning Friday, May 5 through Sunday, June 25, 2023. The gallery is located at 16 Helena Avenue, just off of Cabrillo Blvd in the Funk Zone. Gallery hours are Friday-Sunday from 12-6pm and by appointment. For more information about this exhibition, please email info@mypetram.com.

Ida Badal (b. 1989, White Plains, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union in New York in 2013. Recent exhibitions include In Lieu, BozoMag, 12.26 West, and One Trick Pony in Los Angeles, and Europa and Rockaway Artist Alliance in New York.

Ryan Nord Kitchen (b. 1988, Minneapolis, Minnesota) holds a BA in Art from Luther College (2011), and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (Hoffberger 2014). Their work has been exhibited internationally at Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Gallery Jacob Bjørn (Denmark), Rod Barton Gallery (London), Site131 (Dallas, TX), Katonah Museum of Art (New York), and others. Kitchen is currently based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.