What is my work about?
My work is an attempt to capture and bind haunted, abandoned styles from the past which I encounter online. The studio/wood-shop becomes a place to then sublimate those findings into physical manifestations, mannerist forms that could only exist today with the aid of archival hindsight.
Artist Statement
Human aspiration is an important evolutionary mechanism that drives our culture and society. Its residue is left behind in the material artifacts of our shared histories. What we think of as a tidy and linear historical timeline becomes wholly interconnected when looking at specific visual threads such as car design or mall architecture. We see how hopes and dreams were passed down from one source only to be modulated to different aims by another. The Internet, with all of its archiving potential, further establishes this rhizomatic worldview as a reality. Nodes of information collide, bifurcate and hybridize in a biological manner. It is in these mutations that the potential for new cultural material can emerge.
The past century saw one of the most explosive periods in human history. The speed at which visual information evolved far outpaced the capacity for the culture to process it. Now, in a new century and with an ever-expanding archive filled with the relics of the past, an archaeological excavation of that data seems necessary. Many of the findings seem to exist somewhere in between the canonical strands. These forgotten and misplaced relics emerge like ghosts that have escaped their referential bodies only to vaguely haunt the surrounding archive. Their intention and context unknown, only their half-life remains appearing alien and mutant to contemporary eyes.
Our online world is governed by the same rules as our living rooms – a blog or news feed is like a coffee table where ideas and objects can be shown to a visitor, usually in the hopes of projecting an idealized self, an aspirational self. In my work I create mental rooms, possible interiors embedded with the digital detritus that inspired and sourced their creation. The hope is to generate a perceptual mood board, an assembled vestige of the shapes and objects plundered from the archive that might allow their haunted virtual selves to live on and, perhaps, become new again.
CV
E d u c a t i o n
2013 MFA in Combined Media, Hunter College
2005 BFA Studio Art – BA Art History, University of Texas at Austin
S e l e c t e d E x h i b i t i o n s
2014
Ryan Lauderdale/Jessica Sanders, KANSAS, New York, NY
Light/Colour/Object, SuperDakota, Brussels
There is a Screen, LVL3 Gallery, Chicago, IL (with Daniel Baird)
2013
Hunter MFA Thesis Exhibition, Fall 2013, New York, NY
Antithesis, Active Space, Brooklyn, NY
Moca, The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale (online exhibition)
Turnpike, Neverland Space (online exhibition)
krsn, Sadie Halie Projects, Brooklyn, NY
2012
Streamlines, KANSAS, New York, NY
Young Curators, New Ideas IV, Meulensteen, New York, NY
2011
Bed Bath & Beyond, NUDASHANK, Baltimore, MD (Solo)
Great New Work, The Joanna, Houston, TX
BYOB: Austin, Wurhaus, Austin, TX
2010
Real life Realm, CoLab, Austin, TX (Solo)
Headspace, RedWhiteYellow Gallery, Box13, Houston, TX
2009
No Lone Zone, Creative Research Lab, Austin, TX
Ryan Lauderdale: Project Space, Okay Mountain, Austin, TX
We Like the Good, Live with Animals, Brooklyn, NY
DIY: Double Wide, Texas Biennial, Women & Their Work, Austin, TX
2008
Texpose, Paragraph Gallery, Kansas City, MO
Harvest, MASS Gallery, Austin, TX
Greetings from Berrydale, Okay Mountain, Austin, TX (with Michael Berryhill)
The Nature Show, LMNL, Austin, TX
H o n o r s
2013 Hunter C-12 Emerging Artist Fellowship, Finalist