Sean Alward and Ryan Taber is an exhibition featuring the work of two young artists from the West Coast: the Vancouver-based Sean Alward, a recent graduate of the University of British Columbia, and the Los Angeles-based Ryan Taber, a recent graduate of California Institute of the Arts.

Exploring a range of issues in their own diverse bodies of work, Alward and Taber share an overlapping interest in art and visual culture’s many formalisms and methodologies. For both artists, the way in which artwork and popular images are made and presented provides a kind of natural sticking point, a place where individual biases and cultural norms meet and intersect.

In his paintings and photographs, Sean Award embarks on an often-humorous investigation of traditional portraiture by way of such throwaway mass-culture photographic sources as mugshots and snapshots, travel pics and publicity photos. Alward’s interest in the reinvention of traditional portraiture finds a parallel in Ryan Taber’s own exploration of the tropes of landscape painting, another traditional genre. Taber’s sculptures and drawings investigate the work of such art-historical figures as Piranesi and Bierstadt, drawing not only on the imagery they produced, but also on the literature, science and popular thinking of the eras in which they lived and worked.

The suggestion that emerges from Alward and Taber’s art is a taxonomic one, suggesting connections about how we think about the world and they way we depict it and shedding light on both our art and its makers.