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Featured Artists
Chris Gollon
Christina Leinemann Knittel
Dan Kitchener
Kaori Takamura
Kelly Vivanco
Lenny Moskowitz
MIke Ciccotello
Ryan W Ruehlen
The Powells
Vincent DiMattio
W. Bennett Berry
Will Kasso Condry
Inspire. What inspires you?
Liquitex Featured Artist
Ryan W. Ruehlen
Boulder, CO
website:
www.rwruehlen.com
Biography
Ryan W. Ruehlen was born in 1984 in the rural college town of Hays, Kansas. Growing up, he spent most of his time exploring the high plains country side, small forests and the peculiar landscape and architecture of his small town. Since youth Ruehlen has possessed a strong D.I.Y. mentality; building his own tree houses, writing his own narratives, constructing elaborate environments out of "lost and found" materials around him. This sort of "rasquache" behavior has played an inherent role in how Ruehlen constructs his often Byzantine and complex sculptural environments and paintings, melding together the fragments of overlapping and contradicting social frameworks, belief structures and cosmologies.
Ruehlen has exhibited his work nationally, receiving his BFA in studio painting from Fort Hays State University in 2007 and is currently working on his MFA at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he also teaches part-time and is scheduled to graduate in the spring of 2013.
Statement
As much as I admire science and am drawn to its rational constructions of reality, I desire mythos. The myth creates meaning through the production of parable and reverence, and myths can range from the everyday, the banal, to the elegant and the absurd. These contradictory and corresponding frameworks, whether they are the scientific and religious, the domestic and industrial, or the playful and serious can be collapsed into one another through the ritual and spontaneous building processes that happen through art making. In a sense, my mixed-media constructions are shrines dedicated to those places, creatures, energies and experiences that challenge and deny each other, the hybrids and ruptures that arise from metaphor and boundary shifting, and the desire to mythologize the ordinary, the mundane, and the nonsensical.
Both domestic and fine art materials intermingle to literally and figuratively stitch together the fabric of reality, to build significance out of raw and ruined substances. Regardless of its factuality or pure absurdity, imagining the divine as a ceiling fan, the soul as and elevator, or atoms and molecules as bed sheets create devices of theatric and queer space providing opportunities and tools to break from normative social environments. By employing the tools of traditional femininity, like sewing, folk storytelling, and nurturing with the social contributions of architectural construction, containment and abstraction of form and body, I continually relocate my position in the larger cosmos, as a spiritual nomad in an environment of ruined and sacred landscapes and the interconnections of public and private value surrounding these fascinating places.