Spanning painting, sculpture, installation, and print media, Tom Ryan’s practice revels in the flaws, incompleteness, and incoherence of human sensory perception. Drawing from source material that includes landscape photography, plein air drawing, digital 3D modeling, and death metal typography, his work reframes vision as a fragmented experience, contingent on cultural context, informed by individual physiology, and full of imperfect translation. The resulting forms oscillate between traditional modes of spatial illusion and strategies of disruption, defying linear narratives and shifting between articulated concepts and raw sensory data.
As top-down coherence falls apart, the works cast doubt on vision as a source of empirical facts, playing at the the porous boundaries of other subjectivities, cohabitants of the here and now, whose experiences and narratives can only be guessed at. A pervasive sense of subjectivity remains undiminished in its immediacy, its horror, and its pleasure, but first-person authority begins to dissolve and destabilize. On this unsteady ground, Ryan’s practice proposes an amorphous set of ethics, where understanding and interrelation are tested and re-tested through careful observation, using inherently flawed sensory instruments.
Tom Ryan (b. 1990, Portland, Maine) currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.