Kathleen Ryan: Souvenir

Karma Gallery Los Angeles · Hollywood

Exhibition on view: Nov 8, 2025 - Dec 20, 2025

In Souvenir, Kathleen Ryan transforms everyday objects into uncanny sculptures that merge body, machine, and fruit with jewelry and crystals. From concrete peaches with embedded engines to oversized rings and a crystalline raspberry, her works explore desire, memory, and materiality. Shimmering surfaces, unexpected scales, and intricate textures upend familiar forms, creating immersive, surreal compositions that hover between the fantastical, the intimate, and the corporeal.

Artist

Kathleen Ryan

Kathleen Ryan’s (b. 1984, Santa Monica, California) sculptures destabilize the symbolic and sentimental values of everyday objects. Desire, mortality, and pop-cultural artifacts take both new and familiar forms through Ryan’s deft plays of material and scale. Delicate, sensual grapes are cast in heavy, utilitarian concrete; mold spreading on a slice of beaded fruit is composed of gemstones like malachite and agate—her materials are often at odds with the subjects they represent. Her sculptures’ forms also shapeshift, generating unexpected affinities and associations: car fenders are curled into the shape of a shell; a bowling ball is an oyster’s pearl; a truck engine is both a peach pit and a beating heart. Ryan lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Works

Artworks in this exhibition