HI. YOU CAN CALL ME RYN
Ryn is a multimedia artist based in Cincinnati, Ohio. They are currently a 5th year student at the University of Cincinnati DAAP, with a focus on technology and multimedia. Their work is primarily focused on gender expression, forms, fantasy, internet-core, and the struggles of empathy in an increasingly hostile world. Their work has been included in a collaborative art exchange show between the University of Cincinnati and the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
Through my usage of video and digital media, I explore the strange in-between space of the post-internet landscape and how it manifests in the physical world. I use the softness of anthropomorphic figures as a way of grounding my work in the humorous, the loud, the intentionally internet-coded. It’s a way to put words to complex concepts such as gender identity and connection.
Being queer is difficult. Living in a human body is difficult. These things hurt a little less when there’s a layer of separation and simulacra between. A cute, violent, memetic, and animalistic veil with its slender claws tearing through the boundaries of the Everywhere.
I interrogate the relationship between the popular and the poor image – the poor image being in reference to the musings of Hito Steyerl who categorized the grainy, compressed, off-putting, and widely shared images of the netscape as such. There’s room for this kind of poor, “shitpost” art to say and do more than many of its high-brow contemporaries.
Growing up through the late 2000s and early 2010s, the internet was a place of metaphysical connectedness. It was most powerful when it said things diegetically – where layers and layers of mythology (manufactured in tandem between the creators and the viewers) build upon each other.
While nostalgia is a powerful poison, I seek to merely reference this simpler time of a slower internet culture, where everything was exciting, interesting, and new. Where everything had a charm to it, regardless of its quality. In the transition between these eras, empathy was lost in the cracks, and I want to reach back towards that empathy. Towards the ability to understand another’s feelings through a simple wink or gesture. The influence of others is felt tenfold in the internet sea, and I tune into that amplification of emotions in order to reflect on my relationship with myself.
aranpreetssajjan@gmail.com | sajjanas@mail.uc.edu