Artist Statement
As an interdisciplinary artist, my artistic practice is a conduit between the figure, the space it creates, and the merging that happens between. Most of my creative inquiry is directed toward revealing the queer and queering the real, and finding the uniqueness or oddness that is life. Through objects, scenes, photography, and painting, I look to assemble pictorial images that aren’t really rooted in any place, medium, or identity. Like my upbringing, they are nomadic figures, living in between places, always in flux, between pigments and photographic ink. Formally, my art is seen as an interdisciplinary assemblage of painting, photography, sculpture, and virtual media that take the form of two dimensional works, mostly on canvas. I begin these works with a piece of clay, a brush stroke, a scene, and I begin a game of wandering through small moments of sights and actions that string together. These assemblages, with layered objects and scenes, are pulled together in an attempt to create a narrative of how a figure can be read or presented.
Bio
Ryan Leitner is an artist and writer who currently lives in New Orleans. His art is centralized around the visualization of queerness through the body, its objects, its history, and space. His two dimensional collages explore figurative objects and their environments through photography, painting, digital media, and sculpture. Outside of the studio, Leitner concentrates on queer visibility in public spaces through restoring Queer public monuments, and exploring how Queer history is historicized. He received his M.F.A. From The Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, holds a B.F.A. From Regents American College of London, and was a participant at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in 2023. He has spoken at New Orleans Museum of Art, was a resident at Joan Mitchell Foundation and is currently a collective member at Antenna Gallery.