Douglas Tausik Ryder Reveals Rich Body Language

Running through October 19th at the DTLA art district’s Jason Vass Gallery, Douglas Tausik Ryder’s Body Language expands upon a sculptural topic he’s worked with in the past, creating an abstract, sensual, and richly geometric view of the female body.

Ryder’s language is a kind of code that bridges technology and nature. The artist creates his smooth, highly textured works using industrial geometric code in a CNC machine, encompassing 3D modeling to create these large-form wood sculptures.

The works are towering, even monumental. Using computer models, he creates his sculptures into assembleable parts, forms wooden maquettes, carves, sands, shapes, and then adjusts his digital model as the work progresses. Once he moves into the machine room, Ryder is using an industrial machine he’s rebuilt, utilizing a digital cutting tool to carve individual portions of his works. He does it all himself with no assistance from an outside source.

The result is a sleek, voluptuous series of works that is abstract in nature but obliquely figurative. Viewed as part of a group show held at Vass several years ago, his “Venus,” which was inspired by his wife’s pregnancy,  is a strong introduction to his work, seemingly entirely smooth, as if it sprung whole cloth after gestating in the artist’s vision.

“Reclining Nude” is just that, both alien and familiar, a ribbon of wood that reaches out to the viewer in compelling curves.

His work is filled with texture, texture enhanced by the technnology he has long been devoted to, making mysterious, even poetic works with precise tools and machine techniques that he taught himself.

The work is seductive and dream-like. It is neither body nor soul entirely, but embodies both. Similarly, his high-tech process belies an instinctual state of grace in his forms. There are no harsh lines or jagged constructs, and yet each work is essentially an elaborate seies of puzzle pieces fit neatly together. They are smooth, yet filled with a raw power that seems to undulate just beneath the surface of his wood, and slips within the curves of his figures.

The Body Language sculptures in this five-work series are enormous in scale, large in their passionate use of form, and sinuous. They have a liquidity to their creation, a washed-smooth take on a geometric form which in and of itself seems born of the body but elevated by the mind and heart. 

The works are cool, clean,  and connected – both within each individual work’s components and between the sculptures that make up the exhibition. Playing off the white walls of the gallery, Ryder’s pieces stand like fluid creatures, captured and frozen within their lustrous wood.

Seeing these works in one sweeping show is a pleasure, and considering how they were shaped is fascinating and yet entirely irrelevant. However they were crafted, they stand as reflective meditations on both the physical and the spiritual.

• Genie Davis; photos provided by Jason Vass Gallery