OMG, a Q&A with interdisciplinary artist Ryan Van Der Hout
OMG.BLOG
2023
https://omg.blog/ryan-van-der-hout-qa/
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 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.