Housekeeping

Rian Kerrane: Housekeeping

Emmanuel Art Gallery

1205 10th Street Plaza, Denver, CO 80204

November 20, 2024–March 8, 2025

Admission: free

Review by Deborah Jang 

Sculptor Rian Kerrane has mounted a significant solo exhibition at the University of Colorado Denver's historic Emmanuel Art Gallery, a former chapel with a rich past of community and artistic activity. Environmental concerns and climate change are at the core of Housekeeping. It is a show whose interactive features reinforce the reality of our shared responsibility in maintaining a fragile planet. The multiple opportunities for hands-on participation also reflect Kerrane's teaching as a Professor of Art Practices at UCD for more than twenty years. This exhibition hits close to home on the Auraria campus, extolling the artist's professional tenure and the scope of her creative vision. 

An installation view of Rian Kerrane’s Housekeeping exhibition at Emmanuel Art Gallery. Image courtesy of the artist.

Kerrane's artistic inquiries and approach began over thirty years ago when she built sculptures with residual metal sourced from cold bonfire sites and on worksites in her native Ireland. Today, as a self-defined contemporary archeologist, she draws on everyday objects and detritus to provoke reflection on our consumer culture, using bygone architectural and domestic items, textiles, plastics, metal, wood, and more. As a fabricator with a deep respect for human ingenuity and craft, she incorporates these objects along with her iron- and steel-working talents. She casts, welds, and assembles elements in a series of layered, engaging installations on display throughout the exhibition space. 

An installation view of Rian Kerrane’s Content of my Drawers, 2016-2024, steel, glass, cast iron, wall mounted steel and glass shelves, repurposed metal stairs, and miscellaneous items tagged and numbered. Image courtesy of the artist.

Along the gallery's back wall, Contents of My Drawers includes various items from the artist's studio—100 of them. Kerrane arranges the items on a number of glass shelves and tables, staging them with a red rolling ladder for closer access and a ledger book in which each item is catalogued. From this collection of found objects—each encoded with a silent history and with potential for new ownership and purpose—the public is invited to select and take away a piece that attracts them. 

A detail view of Rian Kerrane’s Content of my Drawers, 2016-2024, steel, glass, cast iron, wall mounted steel and glass shelves, repurposed metal stairs, and miscellaneous items tagged and numbered. Image by Deborah Jang.

Recipients are instructed to enter the tag number in the ledger and write and/or draw about the object, recording their intention: What do you value about this item enough to give it a home? As of early January, several weeks into the show, half the objects had been appropriated, dramatically and randomly altering the installation design (including the assortment of shadows cast by the display).

One object and its tag in Rian Kerrane’s Content of my Drawers, 2016-2024, steel, glass, cast iron, wall mounted steel and glass shelves, repurposed metal stairs, and miscellaneous items tagged and numbered. Image courtesy of the artist.

With this intimate sharing of objects collected in the nooks and crannies of her drawers over time, Kerrane invites the public into her home and personal life. Of each item, she reflects: “I see the value and human ingenuity in everything I pick up. There is latent value in detritus, but also a history in the inanimate objects. They tell a story of personal relationships. I like to pay tribute to things by using them. In my system everything is equal.” [1]

Rian Kerrane, Pillars of Society, 2024, plastic, fabric, steel, cast iron, and cast bronze. Image courtesy of the artist.

A detail view of Rian Kerrane’s Pillars of Society, 2024, plastic, fabric, steel, cast iron, and cast bronze. Image courtesy of the artist.

Similarly, Pillars of Society includes a multitude of colorful plastic objects and bottle tops from Kerrane's 15-year stash of things-she-didn't-want-to-add-to-the-landfill. They are brightly strewn like a landscape across a finely tasseled rug of plastic bags, from which arises a cluster of 8-foot-tall steel towers topped with cast iron houses, plants, and bouquets. Each vertical structure stands apart from the others, surrounded by recycled fencing and interspersed with cast bronze radiator replicas. These pillared houses are like fortified towers in a neighborhood, offering commentary on societal isolationism and on the cycle of oil to plastic to consumer to waste.

Rian Kerrane, Emoji of the Day, 2019-2024, twenty-six steel and iron branding irons (A-Z alphabet), linoleum, and miscellaneous hooks and racks. Image courtesy of the artist.

Language and symbols offer considerable meaning in several of the Housekeeping installations. Reflecting on the reductive ways the electronic world is affecting language and communication, Kerrane employs cast metal forms of the alphabet and emoji symbols that she scorches onto paper prints and places in plastic sleeves. She incorporates the actual iron and steel "branding irons" into the show as well as footage from a 2019 performance at the University of Minnesota Minneapolis celebrating 50 years of iron casting. 

Rian Kerrane demonstrates how to interact with her fabricated speech bubble that is part of her installation Emoji of the Day. Image by Deborah Jang.

At that event, visitors branded messages onto prepared ironing boards, one of which is displayed in Emoji of the Day. Emmanuel Gallery visitors are invited to choose an emoji print to insert into a welded speech bubble and convey their message to the world by posting a selfie on Instagram. By the show's end, the generated collaboration will serve as a means to critique both the content and modes of everyday communication.

A view of the binders in Rian Kerrane’s Word of the Day, 2024, steel, wood, binders, paint, magnets, and branded prints. Image courtesy of the artist.

A view of the display structure in Rian Kerrane’s Word of the Day, 2024, steel, wood, binders, paint, magnets, and branded prints. Image courtesy of the artist.

For Word of the Day, participants are challenged to select scorched letters from a row of brightly colored binders to create words and phrases that have meaning in their own lives, spelling them out on a large display board. Each day for the duration of the exhibition, gallery staff will photograph and catalogue the offerings, resulting in a final published, collaborative composition. A sampling of the words contributed so far include catastrophic, excelsior, midden, gasping, with, antiquated, chic, and haberdashery.

Rian Kerrane, Indicators, five vintage mop buckets with colored acrylic disks, two cast iron mops with plastic handles, and two full/empty gauges. Image courtesy of the artist.

An installation view of Rian Kerrane’s Climate Change, 2024, video projection (video editor: Trace Setton). Image courtesy of the artist.

Continuing with the show's interplay of language and objects, on the mezzanine level of the gallery Kerrane has installed Indicators. This work is made up of a collection of industrial-strength galvanized mop buckets and mops, invoking the housekeeping theme, among which stand fabricated dashboard gauges and warning lights. The installation stands adjacent to Climate Change, a video projection captured from Kerrane’s 2021 sculpture exploring farming practices and water scarcity. 

Rian Kerrane, still from Climate Change, 2024, video projection (video editor: Trace Setton). Image courtesy of the artist.

Originally exhibited in an exhibition at Seidel City in Boulder, Colorado, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Artnauts artist collective, the looping footage shows thirteen letters bobbing on the bottom of buckets. These were independently filled with water, causing them to tip over at varying intervals and occasionally line up to spell CLIMATE CHANGE in a slot-machine like convergence. As we gamble with scarcity of resources and delinquent remedial action, the message in this work seems to be that there are no jackpot winners here.

Rian Kerrane, Clutch, 2018, cast glass, fake grass, and wood. Image by Andrew Palamara.

In the midst of these bold, provocative statements sits a small, finely cast glass clutch purse laying on artificial turf. It is perhaps a quiet reminder of the fragility of our predicament, as well as a demonstration of the breadth of Kerrane's expression and artistic skillset. In contrast, a work titled Row your Boat is a weighty vertical assemblage consisting of two tall cast iron rowing oars mounted to the wall with found steel items.

Rian Kerrane, Point A to Point B, 2024, adhesive vinyl, handbag straps, and miscellaneous hardware. Image courtesy of the artist.

An installation called Point A to Point B runs along the mezzanine stairway. The topmost element is a two-dimensional image of Kerrane's spherical, distressed, globe-like sculpture with a porthole. From this a swooping trail of women's handbag straps and miscellaneous hardware narrows to a cast iron boat whose hull bears the poignant cue: FOREVER.

A detail view of the cast iron ship in Rian Kerrane’s Point A to Point B, 2024, adhesive vinyl, handbag straps, and miscellaneous hardware. Image courtesy of the artist.

In my conversation with curator Jeff Lambson, he notes that the Emmanuel Art Gallery was built in 1876 and is Denver’s oldest standing religious structure. A landmark jewel of a building surrounded by the modern functionality of campus classrooms and facilities, it is a venue now charged with elevating student and community experience. It serves as a space of connection, empathy, and reflection facilitated through art exhibitions and experiences that speak to "our own journey and the world around us." [2]  

An installation view of Rian Kerrane’s Housekeeping exhibition at Emmanuel Art Gallery. Image courtesy of the artist.

Kerrane's Housekeeping powerfully embodies and epitomizes this purpose, in form and content, plumbing the artist's personal history, sensibility, and expression to incite conversation through everyday objects and language in a tenuous era of environmental disquietude.

Deborah Jang (she/her) is an artist and author based in Denver, Colorado. Her assemblage sculpture work has been exhibited throughout the region and she has two published collections of her poetry.

[1] From Rian Kerrane’s Introductory Gallery text for Housekeeping, November 2024.

[2] From the Mission Statement on the Emmanuel Art Gallery website: www.emmanuelgallery.org/history.