Kate Barnett
Alyse Ronayne will show at smoke the moon soon, and she does commissions, too. Check out her rug work on Instagram at @opalrugs.
Way out in Chupadero, just a little bit past the point where the city feels like a distant memory, Detroit-born artist Alyse Ronayne has crafted herself a little bit of paradise. Most days you’ll find her in her garage-turned-studio just beside the tiny house where she lives; some weekends she works for a friend at the Santa Fe Farmers Market, but with a goal of making her artistic practice a full-time job, we might consider her a homebody.
It’s a far cry from Ronayne’s previous life. She attended undergrad at the Maryland Institute College of Art—which, she says, surprised her family, though they ultimately supported her artistic pursuits. Next came graduate school at Bard College and, after that, New York City. Then, she worked as an artist’s assistant while eking out her own illustrative and painterly practice. She became enamored with charcoals and pastels, and with paper and other products crafted with materials that occur naturally. Still, she says, while she wouldn’t trade her New York days, she only got to spend about 20% of her time on her own work. At the time, she also traveled for her alma mater, MICA, recruiting artsy high school students for the school, which brought her to New Mexico a number of times. Something about that stayed with Ronayne, and when the pandemic struck NYC hard, she found herself dreaming of the high desert. She moved here full time in 2020.
“I didn’t really understand what high desert was,” Ronayne tells SFR at her Chupadero studio, “but it was just so different to anything I grew up seeing in Detroit, and it was really different than living in New York. It felt easy to fall in love with New Mexico.”
Ronayne strolls her studio pointing out different pieces in various states of completion. On one wall, she’s working to finish a custom-ordered rug as part of her Opal Rugs commission-based side hustle. When it’s done, it will find its way into a soon-to-open Marcy Street café and natural wine bar dubbed La Mama. For now, Ronayne is still in process.
Outside, her Pomeranian gallops about, taking in one of the warmer days of the season, and there’s an arroyo nearby that Ronayne describes hearing in full flowing effect post-rain and post-snow. Inside her sunny studio, spools of brightly colored yarn spill across a large central table upon which Ronayne has built a scale model of Canyon Road gallery smoke the moon where she’ll open the site-specific solo exhibition Long Live on Friday, April 7.
Between now and then, she’s gathering new work, though much remains in flux. Two in-process pieces best described as abstract rugs and created with a handheld electric tufting machine hang on a makeshift wall. Ronayne is also plotting out how to best craft a piece from rebond foam (think carpet pads, and note that Ronayne is attracted specifically to the material’s strangely beautiful geometric qualities) that will ultimately take over the entire floor of the gallery and become a living piece. According to the model, she’ll have a number of small, temporary walls floating away from the smoke the moon’s permanent surfaces that will all but require viewers to actively engage with the work by peering around each side. Viewers will have to walk on the rebond to do so, which will mar and change its appearance over time and also create a sort of optical illusion that will seemingly alter the dimensions of the space.
And that’s only the beginning. In some ways, Ronayne says, even she’s not certain about every last piece that will appear in the show—still, she knows she’d like to subvert expectations and experiences. Fair enough, particularly since smoke the moon itself feels like a subversion to the pomp and circumstance of Canyon Road’s more, shall we say, expensive elements.
“I think this is how the show would have turned out in any gallery space in town, though,” she explains. “I like to respond to the architecture that I’m given in a space. I don’t want to just use a wall because it’s there. Anywhere I install work, I think about that. If I walk into a space and the room looks different or if I have to walk around something, the process seems way more meaningful.”
That doesn’t mean Long Live won’t also feature various smaller and more traditional works and prints hidden farther within the space, rather that Ronayne is searching for a showstopper element that can best display her evolving practice while making viewers question what they see. Whatever finds its way into the show, though, Ronayne is mostly just happy to get it out there.
“There is something really gratifying about being asked to install in a public space,” she says.
All that’s left is for the rest of us to go and see.
Alyse Ronayne: Long Live Opening: 5-7 pm Friday, April 7. Free. Smoke the Moon, 616 1/2 Canyon Road, smokethemoon.com
