Ryland Fortie

Disparate Meander

Max Keene’s reflections on this work can be found here.

Live studio visit with Ryland Fortie and Max Keene was held on July 28, 2022. Watch the recording below.

The core of my practice is a focus on how an object's value is reflected through a distorted utopian worldview that created it: As a society, (there has been an informal collective agreement) we have agreed to breathe into existing the objects that surround us. These objects become artifacts of our needs and desires. They become validated in themselves as having importance in this world, having some secret or sacred power that I must learn to extract. My act of artist then becomes that of the bricoleur, piecing and sorting through the detritus to create meaning out of what has been given to us, as if seeing for the first time. This takes on the form of daily reimaginings of the makeup of what living is, inserting a façade of fantasy or quest over the mundane and the regular, into a narrative of exploration and curiosity.

As space continues to unfold, and the universe arranges and rearranges into endless possibilities, the human algorithm transposes the frequencies of materiality into new formulation, like strands of divine curiosity.

May no stone go unturned.

This collection features:

“Knowing the future, but understanding why things should be”, a wishing well sculpture that uses a children’s play site as a base for meandering. And “How to break a loop after appearance of warnings”, A wall mounted mask-like structure made from plastic bags, and reshaped into a abstract dinosaur skull, implementing a fossil fuelled feedback loop of dark materiality.

Disparate Meander is a collection of two previously unexhibited art works that book-end my practice in my current space.