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Kathleen Ryan’s Souvenir at Karma Los Angeles unfolds like a glittering emotional booby trap: a room full of oversized memories, sugary illusions, and objects swollen with psychological charge. The exhibition presents nine sculptures, each carrying the blurred sentiment of something once loved, once embarrassing, once precious, and now magnified until its emotional core becomes impossible to ignore. The press release makes it clear: these works deal in “longing, shame, sweetness, and sentiment,” letting symbolism mutate under the pressure of scale and contradiction.

Sunset Strip, 2025. Amethyst, rose quartz, agate, calcite, chalcedony, kyanite, celestite, stilbite, apophyllite, aquamarine,
rhodonite, sodalite, quartz, cherry quartz, glass, acrylic, aluminum and steel pins on coated polystyrene, 75½ × 81 × 25 in.
(191.77 × 205.74 × 63.50 cm)

Ryan’s poetics hinge on material tension, softness turned rigid, sweetness decaying into grotesque bloom, sparkle masking a heavier truth. Souvenir intensifies that logic. Her sculptures don’t illustrate emotions; they perform them, staging the emotional messiness that clings to everyday objects long after their practical lives end.

The trio of cast-concrete peaches, Heartthrob, Heartbreaker, and Wild Heart, embody this duality with surgical clarity. Their skins appear tender and tactile, but each peach hides an automotive engine in place of its pit. The press release positions these works as meditations on beauty’s collision with violence, vulnerability fused with machinery. The friction is immediate: desire meets metal, and softness becomes a shell for something relentlessly mechanical. The peaches aren’t metaphors for the body, they’re metaphors for how the body feels.

Wild Heart, 2025. Concrete, steel and Harley Davidson engine.

Heartbreaker, 2025. Concrete, steel, and Ford Transit engine.
Heartthrob, 2025. Concrete, steel and Ford F-150 engine.

The four monumental ring sculptures push Ryan’s poetics into the terrain of adolescence. Built from soda-can aluminum, bowling balls, resin, steel, and glass, they swell costume-jewelry tropes into emotional monuments. The press materials explicitly link these oversized rings to teenage glamour, awkward desire, and the sentimental charge of decorative objects. Glitter becomes weight. Sparkle becomes memory sediment. The rings drag their cultural baggage behind them, romance, insecurity, melodrama, just as the press release phrases it: “symbols dragging their prior contexts.”

Heavy Heart, 2025. Cast iron and glass.

From the left: Starstruck, Heavy Heart (back), Show Pony, Sunset Strip, Sweet Nothings.
2025

Then there is Dreamhouse (2025), the gravitational center of the exhibition and the most theatrical expression of Ryan’s material logic. A colossal raspberry encrusted with beads and gem-like growths, it blooms with mold-like textures on its surface. Inside, a crystalline cavern of pink and red forms creates a jewel-toned stalactite chamber. Dreamhouse turns sweetness into spectacle, rot into ornament. It doesn’t resolve its contradictions, it revels in them.

Dreamhouse, 2025. Malachite, azurite, lapis lazuli, amazonite, aventurine, turquoise,
chrysocolla, magnesite, howlite, amethyst, garnet, serpentine, quartz, chalcedony and
quartz stalactite, fluorite, coral chalcedony, zeolite, larimar, sodalite, calcite, acrylic, steel,
aquaresin, stainless-steel nails, and steel pins on coated polystyrene, 83 1⁄2 × 83 1⁄2 ×
86 1⁄2 in. (212.1 × 212.1 × 219.7 cm)

The exhibition also introduces two sculptures that sharpen the emotional palette of Souvenir: Sunset Strip’s and Starstruck.

Both works appear in the press release as part of the exhibition’s constellation, extending yan’s vocabulary of hybrid forms and shifting symbols. While the gallery does not expand on their individual narratives, their placement within Souvenir echoes the show’s thematic spine: the pull between glamour and decay, fantasy and heaviness, the curated shine of memory and the raw material that supports it. Their titles alone, Sunset Strip’s and Starstruck, invoke Los Angeles mythologies of fame, seduction, and selfperformance, fitting seamlessly into Ryan’s ongoing interrogation of how cultural icons accumulate emotional residue.

Starstruck, 2025. Agate, tektite, obsidian, amethyst, amber, pyrite, hematite, lapis lazuli, lava rock, black
kyanite, smoky quartz, garnet, carnelian, jasper, tiger eye, wood, glass, acrylic, aluminum and steel pins on
coated polystyrene, 77 × 80 × 20½ in. (195.58 × 203.20 × 52.07 cm

Show Pony, 2025. Aluminum, powder coating, and glass.
Sunset Strip, 2025

Starstruck, 2025.
Show Pony, 2025.

Taken together, the nine works act as a map of Ryan’s poetics. The press release outlines her interest in the “emotional life of objects,” and Souvenir delivers that idea with physical force. Fruit becomes engine; rings become architecture; berries become caverns. Everyday motifs swell into psychological landscapes, negotiating desire, shame, and the strange intimacy of symbols we inherit without choosing.

Born in 1984 in Santa Monica and now working in Los Angeles, Ryan uses materials, concrete, resin, metals, soda cans, plastic beads, stones, the way a poet uses language. Not descriptively, but structurally. She lets material contradictions expose emotional ones. “Soft things made hard,” “sweet things made grotesque”, these press-release phrases aren’t stylistic flourishes; they’re the blueprint of her practice.

A souvenir is usually small, something you slip into a pocket. Ryan overturns that expectation. Her souvenirs are oversized, excessive, heavy with meaning. They refuse portability. They insist on being carried psychologically rather than physically. They are reminders of states of mind, not places on a map.

In Souvenir, Kathleen Ryan builds a world where sweetness bruises, glamour sours, and sentiment grows geological. You enter for the shimmer; you stay for the tension. Her objects don’t simply look back at you, they remember you.