Nick Ryan Gallery presents Strangeday Almanac, a solo exhibition by painter Lydia Farrell in the main gallery. In the lower-level space will be Liquid Amnesia, a mixed-media installation by Alicia Ordal. Also on the lower level are Plan-O-Grams by Kansas City–based artist Garry Noland.
Lydia Farrell is an artist based in their hometown of Littleton, Colorado. Farrell earned a BA from Knox College, a post-baccalaureate certificate from Brandeis University, and an MFA from Boston University in 2015 before returning to Colorado. Farrell has participated in residencies in Beijing, China; the Vermont Studio Center; and the Art Students League of New York’s VYT Residency. Their work has been reviewed in publications including Southwest Contemporary and DARIA Art Magazine.
Farrell’s paintings transform familiar suburban settings into scenes charged with a blend of humor and the macabre. Drawing from their experiences growing up along the Front Range, Farrell uses fluorescent color, crisp detail, and layered compositions to recast everyday spaces as theatrical stages where the ordinary tilts toward the uncanny.
Personal reflections—including themes of sobriety—merge with references to folklore, horror tropes, and the exaggerated logic of urban legends. Spectral figures, cryptic symbols, and mischievous creatures inhabit driveways and front yards, mingling with pets and domestic objects in strange, unexpected ways. Even at their darkest, these scenes hum with humor and vitality. Farrell’s neon palette and cartoonlike distortions keep the work balanced between dread and delight, blurring the line between the real and the surreal.
Alicia Ordal is a Colorado-based artist who received a BFA from Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design and spent her formative art years in Denver’s DIY community, collaborating with other creatives. Ordal was a resident artist at RedLine Contemporary Art Center from 2008–2011 and is currently an associate member of the artist-run collective Hyperlink. Her work has been shown nationally and locally at venues including BMoCA, the Arvada Center for the Arts, Black Cube Museum, and MCA Denver.
Ordal’s installation Liquid Amnesia is centered on water and the many ways it can be visually represented. For this body of work, Ordal creates sculptural elements using varied materials to evoke reflection, distortion, surface, and depth. Influenced in part by the fiction novel Something New Under the Sun, the work considers the uneasy boundary between natural water and its artificial counterparts, inviting viewers to reflect on a substance both essential and unstable.
Garry Noland is a Kansas City–based artist whose work spans painting, collage, and sculpture, often built from reclaimed or humble materials that carry traces of use, wear, and time. A graduate of the University of Missouri–Kansas City, his recognitions include a NEA/Mid-America Arts Alliance Fellowship, a Studios Inc. Residency Fellowship, and a Charlotte Street Visual Artists Fellowship. Noland has exhibited at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Cleve Carney Museum of Art, and the John Michael Kohler Art Center, among others. Since 2020, he has operated Holsum Gallery, an artist-run project space in Kansas City.
