Ryan Gander A Moving Object, or Secret sauce, 2024

An ice cream cone sits upside down on the floor, as if it has accidentally been dropped a moment ago. The ice cream is still solid near the cone and melting away where it has made contact with the floor.

Made from painted bronze, the small life-size sculpture alludes in a playful manner to profound and existential issues. Ryan Gander observed a child dropping an ice cream and came to understand this experience as a primary lesson of regret: Before this incident, everything was perfectly fine, but afterwards, everything has changed. It is not possible to go back in time to undo the occurrence – even the most intense regret will not help achieve that. Thus as a temporal marker, the dropped ice cream not only stands for one-time decisive points on the linear axis between past and future, but also for the futility of regret, perhaps especially that of an adult regarding childhood.

A Moving Object juxtaposes the fragility of the representation with the strength of its actual materiality – as bronze, the ice cream is “frozen” in its state of beginning dissolution. In addition, as cast of a dropped ice cream, the work combines notions of the intentional and the accidental.