Ryan Scails is a multidisciplinary artist based in Philadelphia, PA. His work examines the nuances of materiality within the built world and how intentional shifts in details can give humans context in ways that confront the limits of their bodies and the matter that surrounds them. He's interested in the relationship between texture, contact, and use, and feels linked to those factors as a matter of historical convention. As a person of color, he constantly navigates the embrace and resistance of his environment and often considers the human body an example of material conflict; typically incongruent with its surroundings, but quick to adapt in remarkable ways. Like desire lines joining two paths, he considers the attrition of labor, routine, and water’s tendency to find the lowest point as personal catalysts for building. While contemplating the impact of pre-industrial, vernacular technologies; many erased or overlooked, he seeks to balance the need for considered engineering and careful stewardship back to the ground.
The idea that objects are never truly at rest or inanimate, guides his focus on liminal space and the ad-hoc self-engineering that enables our care and ensures our survival within it. Rendering drawings and drafting production directives allows him to work through multiples in a way he considers more cellular than series-driven. Ryan is interested in showing work that is honest about the duress it’s under by leaning into the logic of structure and exemplifying how things can be made with an almost obsessive acceptance of entropic change. The results can include compounded drawings with unreasonable layers of material or information, overbuilt paintings composed for structural integrity, forms born of additive saturation, and garments made to empower the individual and facilitate exploration.
Ryan Scails (b. 1987) received a BFA from Cooper Union and is currently an MFA candidate in Fibers & Material Studies at Tyler School of Art and Architecture. His most recent exhibitions include ForGround at Peer to Peer (Los Angeles, CA), High Beams at Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Los Angeles, CA), Touching Down Lightly at Moonmist (Houston, TX) and a solo show titled Another Now at SARDINE (Brooklyn, NY). Ryan has attended residencies at MASSMoCA, Textile Arts Center, and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center Arts/Industry program.