Exhibition | DIRTY PICTURE II | Ryan Danny Owen

January 23 – April 15, 2026 

Opening Reception and Artist Talk: Friday, January 23, 5-7pm

Struts Gallery is pleased to present DIRTY PICTURE II, a new solo exhibition by Ryan Danny Owen. This exhibition recontextualizes various personal archives, bootleg tapes, and objects through an imagined porno film set.

Fantasy Sequence II (Blue Fantasy Motor Inn), 2026 transforms the gallery into a fantasy motel room set for a fictitious blue film and a monument to queer longing, nostalgia, loss, and the absent body. Exploring the idealization of sexuality, masculinity, and gender through hypersexualized material, the installation fuses representations of intergenerational loss and the AIDS crisis with the artist’s experience growing up queer in the prairies, where these risqué images became sanctuary. Cyanotype and denim are used throughout the installation, transforming duvets, pillows, and curtains, while a worn-out VHS video plays a collage of bootleg pornography, late-night cable TV, and home movies. Referencing the blue tone of seminal queer artists such as Derek Jarman, Cy Twombly, and Felix Gonzalez Torres, Ryan Danny Owen renders a pavilion to queer nostalgia, love, and time.  

Produced specifically for Struts Gallery’s window, Double Feature, 2025 is a stained-glass work that recontextualizes a pornographic magazine centerfold (SOLO, Number. 2, July 1979) with adult film star Jeff Hitchcock. In his only appearance in print and film, Hitchcock examines his nude body reflected across a series of mirrors. The photographs included in the magazine were taken during the filming of Spittin’ Image (1979), produced by Nova Studios and directed by Scott Masters. Inspired by the myth of Narcissus, Spittin’ Image depicts Hitchcock watching himself in the mirror over his bed, self-fantasizing in an increasingly complex and stimulating hall of mirrors. The film is now a piece of lost media, with no accessible digitized versions available and the artist’s time-worn and water damaged copy of SOLO magazine a rare, printed remnant. The artist transforms and elevates this perverse material into cathedral glass, documenting a queer history on the edge of being lost. Appearing at first as multiple figures, the image reveals itself to be one form examining his body in the various reflections. Sexual in nature and introspective at second glance, this image becomes an incredibly charged examination of body dysmorphia, loss, and dissociation. 

The exhibition also includes pieces from RDO’s ongoing Rubbing series, where archival prints of vintage gay pornographic magazines have been manipulated with erasers, sandpaper, blades, and chemicals, forming unique compositions at the cost of the original. Exploring performing an act of pleasure such as “rubbing out” onto a loaded material to distort and destroy the archived image challenging loss, sexuality, and identity.  

DIRTY PICTURE II is on from January 23 – April 15, 2026. An Opening Reception will take place Friday, January 23, 5-7pm. The artist will be in attendance. This exhibition includes images and videos with nudity, sexuality, flashing lights, and glitch media. 

IMAGE: Installation of DIRTY PICTURE at Truck Contemporary. Photo courtesy of the artist.

About the artist

Ryan Danny Owen (they/him/her) is a non-binary award-winning author, researcher, queer archivist, and interdisciplinary artist based in Mohkinistis/ Treaty 7/ Calgary, Alberta. Their transdisciplinary work reexamines nostalgia, trans identity, longing, sexuality, and kinship by combining archival practices, installation, video, craft, and writing.  

Utilizing process-based approaches, automatic response, and long-term relationships with materials to uncover ways of rendering the absent body, loss, and time. Their work deconstructs gay pornographic media as representations of intergenerational queer identity, constructing spaces through a fixation with artifice, manipulation, research, and experimentation.