Of Two Minds
Marta is pleased to announce Of Two Minds, an exhibition of new functional-sculptural work by Pasadena-based artist and designer Ryan Belli. The gallery’s first solo outing with Belli, following his inclusion in Under / Over (2020) and, most recently, From the Upper Valley in the Foothills (2025), the presentation employs memory as a (re-)structuring principle, examining its material and spiritual capacities to hold dual, often contradictory, truths, made manifest by the evocations of a single phrase: “I remember it differently.”
For Belli, materials are a mode of expression. They are the physical illustration of an idea and its implied double: the alternative—whether suspected, assumed, or desired—of a viewer’s contact with his work. Rendered in disparate mediums and across diverse functions (wood, metal, and textiles; seating, surfaces, cabinetry, and lighting), the artist’s formal choices allow shapes to take on new meaning. Lengths of ribbon are sewn into peaked light shades that translate traditional bricklayers’ patterns into Albers-esque constructions, the pliant fabric becoming firm, subverting the need for rigorous internal supports, and contextualizing color—greens; yellows; pinks—as the German-American artist and educator did: a physical, observation-dependent element of the work. Belli’s collection of variously sized lights dialogue with the hand-carved redwood perch and coastal live oak stool, which follow the plastic logic of a sack of grain: slouching yet stable, its rigidity reliant on the volume of its contents and predicated on the supple enclosure of burlap. With pointed detailing—are they ears? Horns?—these lightly figurative works, iconic in the artist’s tender treatment of wood, animate in partnership, extending a familiar camaraderie both mischievous and fundamentally optimistic, like two creatures peeking over a fence to get a look at the activity on the other side.
Throughout the exhibition, hard materials appear soft and vice versa, a doubling effect that’s reflected, quite literally, in Belli’s cast and polished aluminum mirrors. Each, through their irregular surface treatment, poses the phenomenon of catching someone else’s eye in a reflection, two perspectives conversing and then projected, fun-house-mirror-like, in recognizable yet altered terms. Here, Belli draws out the nuances of collective versus individual memory; the subtle blurring and discrete insights that take shape within the primal relationships of artist and viewer, artist and family, artist and steward, each lens of perception an opportunity to explore the paradoxes of human experience; the cognitive dissonances woven into any given day. We look, as the Janus head does, in opposing directions at once.
