Ryan Van Der Hout

ryanvanderhout.com
instagram.com/r_vanderhout

  • Cradle My Insides and I’ll Nourish Yours or More Important Than Bread - 2024 - Iron, steel, Formica, pigment print on vinyl, flocking, UV print on glass, solder, plywood - 43 x 20 x 6 inches

  • Formless I Fall or More Important Than Bread - 2024 - Iron, steel, Formica, pigment print on vinyl, flocking, plywood - 20 x 63 x 6 inches

  • More Important Than Bread or The Weight of Levitation - 2024 - Iron, steel, Formica, pigment print on vinyl, flocking, plywood - 20 x 40 x 4 inches

  • Exodus or Torn and Cut in your Reflection - 2024 - Steel and mirror finish stainless steel - 20 x 120 x 40 inches

  • Fragment - 2024 - UV print on glass and solder - 6 x 10 inches

  • Fragment II - 2024 - UV print on glass and solder - 12 x 14 inches

  • To Reflect Everything and Show Nothing - 2023 - Pigment print - 32 x 40 inches

  • To Reflect Everything - 2024 - Painted steel, mirror finish steel, fiberglass - 7 x 10 x 7 feet

Artist Statement

I am a Canadian interdisciplinary artist based in New York City, exploring the material processes of creation to navigate states of being such as grief, undoing, and queer identity. My work spans photography, public art, and sculpture. My style is typically fragmented and maximalist. My art prompts questions about shedding our skin and examining what lies beneath when we tear ourselves apart. I do this through a queer perspective, incorporating elements of Jewish ritual and self-portraiture to explore the body’s fragmentation and underlying subjectivity.

 Throughout my work, the recurring theme is the exploration of the self and the body, as well as the concept of wholeness. This theme manifests in photographs that portray the atomized body spread across gallery walls and in weighty sculptures resembling Challah bread, evoking the image of bodies torn apart and suspended. The question of what it means to inhabit a body or view the world from within one’s body continues to be a central focus for me.



Artist Bio

Ryan Van Der Hout (b. 1987), a Canadian interdisciplinary artist based in New York City activates the material processes of making to navigate states of being such as grief, undoing and queer becoming. Their work encompasses photography, public art and sculpture.

Van Der Hout’s work has been widely featured in publications including The Huffington Post, Vogue Italia, Fortune Magazine, Larry’s List, CBC, PhotoEd Magazine and Reader’s Digest. He has exhibited across Canada, the United Kingdom, and New York, most notably in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Collectors Series, as part of a Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival primary exhibitions, and in The Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward festival. He has created public art for the City of Toronto, Toronto Archives, The TTC, Nuit Blanche and Pemberton Developments. Van Der Hout was awarded the Emerging Artist Award by the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, and has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Metropolitan University and is an MFA Fine Arts candidate at Parsons at The New School for Design.