Everything, In a Way, Is a Cloud: Ranny Macdonald
General Assembly is pleased to present Everything, In a Way, Is a Cloud, an exhibition of works on paper from Ranny Macdonald’s ongoing cloud series.
Clouds resist capture, and thus any attempts to depict them must first grapple with their inherent impermanence. They are too vast and mutable, too easily undone by the weight of definition. When pursued, they slip through the fingers like air itself, dissolving before they can be contained. Drawing directly from life, Macdonald approaches the cloud as both subject and process: a familiar and beautiful form, but also a vessel for contemplating the nature of perception, language, belief and faith.
The exhibition borrows its title from philosophy professor Rainer Guldin’s essay Anything, In A Way, Is A Cloud, Reflections on a Phenomenon at the Intersections Of Philosophy, Art and Science. In the essay, Guldin explores how humans project meaning onto chaos and see patterns in shapelessness. In his conception, anything that is ephemeral and fluid in nature and lacks fixed boundaries can be called a cloud.
Macdonald’s titles reinforce this perspective. Titles like Croissant, Porcupine and Frog with Fly are playful and encourage a deeper engagement with the subject matter. For his part, Macdonald sees clouds as a language, a visual syntax built on change. Indeed, Macdonald’s clouds remind us that written language itself is merely a collection of shapes, and that shapes themselves have the power to communicate.
Language is at the very core of how we perceive the world, and for the world to be consistent and constant language must also be consistent and constant. Macdonald’s clouds question this conception, indicating that our interaction with language involves an imperfect translation between meaning and how we receive it.
To draw a cloud, then, is to listen to impermanence, to translate the ungraspable and fleeting into form. In Everything, In a Way, Is a Cloud, Macdonald transforms this act into a meditation on uncertainty itself, reminding us that what we perceive as fixed may, in the next moment, dissolve into air.
