Office Space

Cat-Calling My Creativity

October 1, 2021 - December 31, 2021

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“That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.”

― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

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Office Space is proud to present Cat-Calling My Creativity as the debut solo exhibition by Salt Lake City-based conceptual ceramic, performance, and video artist Ryne Ormond. This hybrid show features one looped single channel video entitled “Attempting a Tempting Artistic Ambition” within two formats as a featured piece at Office Space’s new gallery space open only by appointment in Room 415 located at 350 East 400 South in downtown Salt Lake City and virtually on YouTube.

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Inspired by the recondite antics and poodle motifs of General Idea’s seminal work “Shut the Fuck Up,” Ormond invokes the trope of the cat/kitten (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats_and_the_Internet) from its prime status as the “unofficial mascot of the Internet” into a complex linguistic construction going beyond its animalistic matrix. Through combining the concept of “cat-calling” as a male form of sexual harassment against females, the artist parodies the Western concept of artistic creativity, typically codified within the female physical body as a Muse, as the fount of male heroism and grandeur. The artist as voiceover narrator becomes a focal point for a deconstruction of the artistic process as a parody of self-psychoanalysis within the framework of a male feminist self-critique. Within his blistering monologue, Ormond as the lead fictional character within his work vacilliates among various jumping points until he reaches an ironic zenith of the cat meme where flying cats appear miraculously from the open mouth of a gigantic cat transfixed within a seeming yawn.

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Also cats and kittens have appeared in contemporary works ranging from Camille Henrot’s 2013 Grosse Fatigue, which reflects on cats in art history, to Cory Arcangel’s 2009 YouTube trilogy Drei Klavierstücke op. 11, which conflates cats as music performers within a bizarre conceptual archive of atonal sounds. Ormond’s ironic yet profound piece acknowledges the feline’s place within art history while employing the meme within the parameters of private ritual and art practice into the skeleton of a mashup and absurdist monologue. As this work becomes an exegesis of the artist as cat and cat as artist, the humorous confusion becomes a pivot for sly reflection on an unstable reality based on memes, memesis, and mockery.

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Ryne Ormond was born December 1st, 1996. He grew up in Colorado in a divorced home having to split his time between the two houses. He wouldn’t experience a stable location until middle school on his father’s time, and until high school on his mother’s time. Graduating from Douglas County High School, and after his showing in the Continental League Art Show he pursued a degree in Fine Arts at Metropolitan State University of Denver, Colorado. He transferred to the University of Utah in 2017, where he has maintained his practice with various works getting into exhibitions both within Utah and outside the state as well. As a secret member of the Office Space Collective, Ormond is graduating with a major in Sculpture Intermedia with a minor in Ceramics from the University of Utah in 2021.