Brand New Gallery is proud to announce It's the least we can do., the debut solo exhibition in Italy of Ryan Conrad Sawyer. Comprising the exhibition are select works from Sawyer's series of B.P. (black powder) paintings and his works made from materials often used in construction.

Made by dusting and scattering, then burning, loose gunpowder on primed canvasses, Sawyer's B.P. paintings are the elegant documents of performative gestures. Their compositions held in the balance between control and chance, the works are a contemporaneous iteration of minimalism's concerns with duration, materiality, and semiotics. Shrewd and frugal in their aesthetic, the context in which they are made is nearly unending in its complexity. From the heritage of Sawyer's own hometown in Virginia, stockpiling of gunpowder is common place and a fever pitch has been reached regarding the contemporary relevancy of the right to bear arms in the 2^nd amendment of the nation's constitution. This social climate provides the framework for artist's own supply and oeuvre. Sawyer's works blankly provoke one the heaviest of political and social discourses.

Similarly, Sawyer's constructions, made from readily accessible home construction materials like insulation, gypsum, nylon, and vinyl, have a bifurcated identity. Obscuring the distinction between material and images, Sawyer's works are not representations per say, but rather full embodiments of what they intend to mean. Like his aesthetic predecessors, the works identify materially with the manual labour trades of a working class that in the 21^st century faces a greater and more debilitating economy. Sawyer's works stand as a staunch reminder of the ongoing prevalence of a growing inequity.

Ryan Conrad Sawyer (b. 1983 in Smithfield, Virginia) lives and works in Richmond, Virginia, and Brooklyn, New York. ìSawyer received a BFA from School Of The Museum Of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts.

Recent exhibitions include Three Works (2013) (solo) at Jericho Ditch in Isle of Wight, US; Home Again, Again II (2013) at The Journal Gallery in New York, US; new works (2012) at Reference gallery in Richmond, US. Upcoming: solo exhibition at James Fuentes Gallery, New York, US.