Ryan Fenchel | Mie Kongo
Arrangements
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 15, 6 - 8 pm
March 15 - April 26, 2025
The Landing is pleased to present Arrangements, a two-person exhibition by Ryan Fenchel and Mie Kongo, exploring how placement, structure, and space shape meaning. The show will open Saturday March 15th, with a reception from 6 - 8 PM. Arrangements will be on view through April 26th.
The exhibition title refers both to the formal act of arrangement and to a deeper inquiry into how elements—painted, sculpted, or implied—interact, shift, and resist fixity. Fenchel’s layered still lifes and Kongo’s sculptural compositions reveal the tensions between spontaneity and order, containment and expansion, presence and absence.
Fenchel’s paintings push the still life genre into a realm of shifting symbols and evolving forms. Vessels—sometimes gourd-like, sometimes elongated—anchor his compositions, holding floral shapes that fluctuate between botanical reference and abstraction. What first appears as a traditional floral arrangement dissolves upon closer inspection: petals morph into brushstrokes, geometric fragments, or faces in flux. While his work nods to the aesthetics of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, it eschews its principles of order and restraint, instead embracing an intuitive process of layering and revision.
A recent trip to Japan prompted Fenchel’s return to drawing, infusing his work with a heightened sense of immediacy. His compositions balance gestural spontaneity with structured precision—sour hues press against muted greys, sharp angles soften into curves, and spatial relationships remain in flux. His paintings hover between the organic and the otherworldly, questioning the stability of forms and continually unfolding.
Kongo’s sculptures, by contrast, engage space and structure through an interplay of material and form. Trained in ceramics, she has worked with porcelain for years, drawn to the material in part because of how it is rarely used in fine art sculpture. Since porcelain is difficult to handbuild or throw on a wheel, she began slipcasting it into modular blocks, using these units as building elements within larger compositions. Over time, she incorporated other materials—cast concrete, wood, and salvaged scraps from her friends’ workshops and her husband’s farm—allowing found materials to shape her evolving vocabulary.
Kongo’s work is guided by juxtaposition: soft curves meet hard edges, polished porcelain contrasts with the raw tactility of wood. Though formally abstract, her works hint at the natural world—not only in the materials she chooses but also in the ways form and color evoke landscape and flora. A painted surface might recall an expansive prairie, while a vertical form might suggest a growing tree and flower. Her recent experiments with oil paint as a surface treatment introduce another layer of tradition, merging two historically distinct mediums—oil painting and porcelain—within a single work.
Together, Fenchel and Kongo explore the ways in which composition shapes perception. Fenchel’s still lifes unravel the conventions of the genre, dissolving distinctions between representation and abstraction, while Kongo’s sculptures negotiate material and space, blurring boundaries between object and architecture. Arrangements reflects on how things come together—and how they are always on the verge of transformation.