A 17th-century etching by Nicolas de Larmessin, now a part of the National Library in Paris, was photographed in the 1960s for a collage on the cover of L'OEIL. Here, the artist has reshot the cover of the magazine, isolated the etching, and then cropped and repositioned it, ideally to free the image from its original commercial/editorial meaning. McKenna looks for the exact inflection point when something moves far enough from its genesis to become its own discreetly “new” thing.

Ryan McKenna culls images from obscure 20th-century print media, reformatting, cutting, cropping, and expanding the original images to create a facsimile of a facsimile (of a facsimile, of a facsimile, ad infinitum). The resulting works are repositioned in a way that asks for revisitation and review through a new, purely aesthetic lens, freed from the initial print media's subjugation and reproduction as advertisement, editorial content, and the like.