Exhibitions

Ryna Frankel

Hold Me, Touch Me

What motivates emotional connection? Tender touch? Sharing?

Ryna Frankel. Tubes (detail), 2019. Mixed media.
  • March 7 - 28, 2019
  • Opening: Thursday, March 7

Hold Me, Touch Me is an exhibition of drawings, video and interactive sculpture that explores affective connection through touch. A series of soft, colorful constructions fill the gallery, inviting intimate contact. Designed to possess an odd neediness, the objects are intended to inspire viewers to care for them, to relate to them, to see their vulnerability. Ryna Frankel asks, “how can we care for something that cannot care for us in return?” and “how can care of an inanimate thing translate into active care for the world we inhabit?”


About the Artist

Ryna Frankel is a visual artist living and working in Seattle, WA. Frankel makes sculptures, paintings, and installations that regularly incorporate the color pink. She likes to think that color is useful in creating tone in artwork, and pink has fun, girly, happy, cute, and oppressive connotations all at once.

Frankel has exhibited her work in a number of Pacific Northwest galleries, was a Multiplying Mediums Fellow, and was an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center. She received a MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Washington in 2017 and completed undergraduate and post-baccalaureate studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London, The University of Pennsylvania, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.