Torn Self Portrait by Ryan Van Der Hout
When you wander into the Toronto Sculpture Garden right now, you’ll find New York-based Canadian interdisciplinary artist Ryan Van Der Hout’s To Reflect Everything – an outsized mirrored sphere that recalls both a disco ball’s joyful character and a satellite’s transportive enticement.
The concept and composition of Van Der Hout’s piece, which is on view in the Sculpture Garden until mid-May, navigates notions of queer utopia, identity, and transcendence. And it invites visitors to pause in contemplation via literal and metaphorical moments of self-reflection, highlighting the impact of our fragmented selves and environments in relation to the idea of incompleteness in belonging.
To Reflect Everything And Show Nothing by Ryan Van Der Hout
To Reflect Everything nestles nicely into Van Der Hout’s oeuvre, a compilation of photographic, public and sculptural works which explore vast themes including grief, queer becoming, and nostalgia; their piece To Reflect Everything And Show Nothing from 2022 is an interesting companion to the larger sculptural piece currently on display in Toronto’s downtown core. The photo is a compellingly abstracted portrait of the artist, who is sporting drag makeup, refracted through the showy grid of a disco ball’s surface.
Begging the question “Who is that?”, Van Der Hout’s image reveals so much about the human condition’s preoccupation with identity definition and construction through a camp lens, which ultimately reveals tantalizingly scant information. In the Toronto Sculpture Garden, Van Der Hout allows us all to step into a similarly fractured, albeit fantastical, world to consider this question of ourselves.
I was eager to have Van Der Hout further illuminate the inspirations behind To Reflect Everything and dig deeper into the depths of his practice for this Q&A. Dive in after the jump!
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