Tom Ryan is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work focuses on his experience of land and landscape across both contemporary and historical contexts. Through painting, sculpture, and installation, his practice examines the flaws and limitations of his own sensory systems, and the resulting ambiguity of his interactions with the surrounding world. Drawing from source material that includes landscape photography, plein air drawing, digital 3D modeling, and death metal typography, his work evokes a fragmented conception of place shaped by cultural milieu, individual physiology, and 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. On this unstable ground, Ryan’s practice casts doubt on first-person experience as a source of empirical fact, playing at the the porous boundaries of other subjectivities whose experiences and narratives reside just beyond reach.
Tom Ryan (b. 1990, Portland, Maine) received an MFA from CalArts in 2023. He currently lives and works in Portland, Maine.