Artist Statement
Definitions depend on what precedes them, built from accumulated information, context, tradition. But what happens when that accumulation is absent? When there is no hometown, no inherited culture, no language passed down from parents? You build those descriptors from scratch.
It mirrors what I understand as the fluidity of Queer existence. In a constant negotiation of legibility, my collages are in flux as objects and forms are removed from their original contexts and placed in relation to one another without hierarchy or fixed orientation. I am questioning what it means to constitute an image or a body, not as a question with an answer but as an inhabited liminal space.
Much like my own nomadic upbringing, this practice never arrives at a stable sense of home or body. Instead it stays interested in the threshold, captured in a moment before something is recognizable, when a form holds multiple identities at once. Through layers that combine painted canvas, photography on thin paper, and wax, I build images that refuse to settle into a single state of being.
Using materials like plastic wrappers, torn tires, the residue of things discarded, I am drawn to objects after they have been used by the body. Photographing these found objects with clays and putties, the collages have been described as fleshy wings on a bone, a wrinkled balloon on a stone.
Bio
Ryan Leitner (b. 1986, Fort Jackson, SC) lives and works in New Orleans. He received his M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and his B.F.A. from Regent's American College of London. He has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. His work has been exhibited at Ferrara Showman Gallery, Locker Room NYC, Antenna, and venues nationally. Through his ongoing project Strange Inheritance, he restores and creates public monuments commemorating Queer histories.