Joan Ryan
(GALLERY ASSOCIATE)
ABOUT
As a visual artist, I use painting and drawing as a critical language to explore contemporary society, politics, and concepts of identity in our modern world. In my most recent works I incorporate a wide variety of images, pictorial elements of place combined with historical imagery, cartoons, childhood fairy tales, and political iconography. My works imitate the way knowledge often comes to oneself, which is by fits and starts and indirection. We no longer live in a world of neat patterns, contemporary culture is disjunct, and it is that part of life my work attempt to reflect.
Using visual symbolism, along with images of everyday life, confronts the viewer at an intersection of a broad range of cultural moments. This junction of imagery creates dynamic interplay and peculiar juxtaposition with the past and present. Incorporating imagery from childhood bring into the work the ideas on the double consciousness of childhood. That is, that the imaginary world provides a transition to our relationship with reality.
The re-representation of historically familiar images challenges the viewer to critique traditional stereotypes of cultural identity and gender. By examining images of identity through our cultural myths, I work to bring into question the belief system through which our society sees the world. In these works, I question our manufactured desire for a fictitious past and present, while revealing the complexity of our contemporary cultural.
