McKenna finds images of materials, objects, or artistic culture which have already been “distilled” — via a photographer’s choice of lighting or an editor’s choice of cropping — and isolates them even further. In this case, an image of a Hawaiian mask, first published in a book on Oceanic art by Albert Morance in 1929, is reshot by McKenna, a nod to Man Ray, who took his own photo of the mask in 1that930 from a lower angle. The mask now rests on a pedestal along the wall of The Pavillon des Sessions in the Louvre.

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.