RYDER MOREY-WEALE
SLEEPING WITH LIGHTS ON
28.08 – 26.09.2024
For Sleeping with lights on, Ryder Morey-Weale presents a series of light sculptures surrounded by grafted plant works which combine various invasive species collected in and around Marseille.
Citing the heterotopic landscapes from which he collects his materials, Sleeping with lights on envisions the exhibition space at Atelier Villeneuve as a growing, invasive, and resilient ecotopia. A place where species collectively collide and hybridize under the auspices of artificial light. Insects settling on the lamps and plants growing from the sediments, anthropologically-tinted alloys become havens for new interfused synergies to arise.
The exhibition is accompanied by the poem 3 Hypotheses by Nina Hanz.
Ryder Morey-Weale (b. Eindoven, NL, 1994) lives and works in Marseille, France. His work has been presented as solo exhibitions (Future Flora, KIOSK, Marseille; Singing at a loud party Bungalow, Berlin), and collective exhibitions and events (Auction sale in support of In Extenso, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Porous Cities, organised by South Parade Gallery and Sofia Hallström at Féria, Marseille; Day of the Frogs, film screening at Floating University, Berlin; Hypertime, at Former Civil Defence Bunker, Shanghai, China; Relocation – a temporary studio, at Marie’s Painting Factory, Shanghai, China). After obtaining a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts at the Institut Supérieur des Arts de Toulouse, France in 2019, he participated in the post-graduate research program Création et Mondialisation at École Offshore in Shanghai, China, between 2019 and 2020.
3 Hypotheses
Nina Hanz
i.
They had grown accustomed to sleeping
with the lights on: lights of the houseglow,
lights of the port’s mouth, the light of my
phone. Daybreak diluted
by the shadow of a moth who dulled
in the presence of each flicker.
The generation prior had grown large to
the light, generation after: wiser, for his
would be the last with burns on the apex
of wings. Clever, he learned distance over
instinct. And those who watched
traded words like wild for domestic
‘til all the wild and all the domestic spun
into a halo of judgement.
It was maintained—wild/domestic—in this
place as repetition in opposition,
replication of the selves.
ii.
Nicotiana glauca crossed easily to land
where the whim goes thrashing petioles
for hours
thrashing petioles for molecules.
Strelitzia to strelitzia, queer to the rhythm
of pollination; Nicotiana glauca fierce in
the process of preservation.
A fantasy generation—so close and utterly
not the same, like atoms of an ancestor
cell. Bacteria back then, before,
not knowing it first. Since then,
time taught
‘native’ if:
‘invasive’ than:
until an insect’s wing was in- and
outwardly lit. [Suffering burns as affection.]
I have gotten used to the intricacies of
species, speculations that twist and
break and branch our expectations. How
often the world you know, and
strange, and altered, still, can astonish
form.
iii.
It was desire, thin dust to night sky
that echoed into change. This modern
world is grey and old, / And what remains
to us of thee?¹
Half of this life came from the divestment
of earthly goods shaken clear from seeds
and feathers. I assumed Pan meant this
as revision.
Familiar winds passed like bright light
through ____________, a monitor of the city.
A niche to bend will.
Was the ocean spray as innocent as the
rest—? Dewdrops kissed the earth and
licked the limestone from cliff faces before
going dry and faint. Forgivable and tame.
¹ Oscar Wilde, ‘Pan’ in Charmides and Other Poems, 1913, Methuen & Co. LTD, London
