THE BROOKLYN RAIL NOVEMBER 2022 - RANDY WRAY: TRAVELOGUE - by Andrew Paul Woolbright

Aug 27, 2026

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Randy Wray’s solo exhibition Travelogue at 15 Orient explores the origins of forms and the “phantom zones” where cells divide and entities emerge. Through layered, vivisection-like compositions across paintings and sculptures, Wray avoids easy reduction, shifting interpretations among bodily interiors, bones, plants, tools, and formal abstractions. The life-and-death spectrum becomes a cross section, while dense surfaces, scraped textures, and carved materials stage tension between living and dead. The bronze works and found-object process further reveal accumulation and shape formation.

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RANDY WRAY: TRAVELOGUE

Exhibition focus: origins and phantom zones

Life and death as cross section mechanism

Painting technique and surface textures

Sculptures and found-object shape formation

THE BROOKLYN RAIL NOVEMBER 2022 RANDY WRAY: TRAVELOGUE by Andrew Paul Woolbright Randy Wray, Plot Device, 2022. Oil on linen, 52 x 28 inches. Courtesy the artist and 15 Orient. Photo: Daniel Greer. Randy Wray’s solo exhibition Travelogue at 15 Orient dredges the depths of where things originate and the phantom zones where cells split and entities emerge. Wray’s ability to avoid semblance and reduction prioritizes specific but undisclosed sources, creating distinct shapes that defer recognition. Hovering in the protean spaces that can simultaneously suggest the interiors of bodies, bones, plants, and tools, Wray’s practice stays in the apeiron, presiding over the final moment where forms resist determination and luxuriating in the mutable recognition of shadows. The paintings and sculptures share the queerness of quarks, shedding interpretations between bio matter, X-rayscans, landscapes, and pure formal abstractions, while engaging in a metaphysical unknowing and unlearning; most significantly, they expand the tension and bond between what is living and dead. The spectrum of life and death provides the range of the exhibition, but ultimately it is the cross section that figures itself as the mechanism in the paintings. Wray commits to the layers and strata of distinct yet unrecognizable shapes by exploring them through vivisections, revealing their hollowed out and transparent overlays. In Accidental Implant (2022), the off-white shape could be a bone hovering above cerebral matter, but just as easily the shapes can be interpreted as petals. In Plot Device (2022) the central shape burns with the color of realgar. It could be an organ, with atriumsand aorta, but its distinct edges make it rigid, possibly suggesting something more akin to sacrum and coccyx. Somehow Wray develops and combines silhouettes that suggest contradictions and unresolved zones of life—the moments of drift between arteries and hedge apple trees, strange durians and fossils, inedible fruits. The plant canker may provide a useful metaphor, and its strange articulations feel present in some of Wray’s paintings, the accumulation of dead tissue and mass that grows but doesn’t live, implies a life and previous purpose that is now left inert and static, yet it blooms in its own dark ways. His wavering, and the peculiarity it releases, is his power. Wray’s negative capability seems to locate the moment of cellular expression, when signal cascades that shape things into form and express binding phenotypes; but just as easily, the language could exist within the settling of dreams, the sublime apeiron, the metaphysical hammer space that closes off [PAGE 1/2](PAGE 1/2 KARMA 188 East 2nd Street New York NY 10009 www.karmakarma.org)[ KARMA 188 East 2nd Street New York NY 10009 www.karmakarma.org](PAGE 1/2 KARMA 188 East 2nd Street New York NY 10009 www.karmakarma.org) the nothing and allows for the becoming. Wray wanders between husk and bloom, seed and tomb. Wray paints without solvents, treating the oil like a sculptural material through a slow process of building up, scraping, and scumbling into the canvas. It’s a language of spreading, rubbing, and removing. Improv Manifesto and Unscheduled Sunrise (both works 2022) have the presence of breakthroughs in Wray’s practice; both introduce a range of textures in autumnal tones while configuring space and density in a series of stacks and chambers. Both conjure in materiality, sanding and scraping until the surface of the painting becomes its own skin, catching and reflecting light differently and negotiating the interpenetration of space. At times, the materiality of the surface is a mortar-like thickness after Dubuffet’s hautes pâtes, and at others it is worn and rubbed down into deep grooves, leaving crazing and pinching rivulets behind. The artist’s dynamism of textures, the spreading and diaphanous mixed with encrusted skins, is another poetics of the boundaries of the living and dead. Something pal

FAQs

What is the central theme of the Travelogue exhibition?

The exhibition focuses on where things originate and how forms emerge through cellular division, framed by ambiguous spaces and shifting recognition. It emphasizes tensions between living and dead rather than fixed interpretation.

How does Wray’s technique shape viewers’ understanding of the works?

Wray builds oil through slow processes—spreading, rubbing, scraping, and scumbling—so the painting surface becomes its own skin. Textures range from mortar-like thickness to deep grooves, with light reflected differently across the work.

What role do the sculptures play in the exhibition’s overall argument?

The bronze sculptures reveal shape formation through material drawing and incorporate found objects with salvage and tool-based thinking. They make accumulation more visible and connect silhouette and shadow across the exhibition.

Aug 27, 2026

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