WORLDS to GO

November 14 to December 21, 2023 (extended from December 17)
10 Times Square Billboard, South East Corner of 41st Street and 7th Avenue
PRESENTED BY ZAZ CORNER “IN BETWEEN” 

WORLDS to GO is a series of videos curated by Limei Wang for the ZAZ Corner Billboard. Crafted between 2022 and 2023, these five videos are constructed through an exploratory editing process of screen collaging, looping, mirroring, and digital color alteration. The starting point for each video is either a handmade work on paper, or a brief recording of transient motion found in Ryan’s daily experience.

Horizontal Voids (Avoids) and Leveling emerge from a collection of cardboard collages that utilize architectural elements to explore material and notional impermanence. Only to Return, Suspension Field, and The Yards originate from moments spent traveling through liminal spaces, where the swooping connection of electrical wires from a train window, the flashes of soot and grime along a motorway’s tunnel walls, and the angular mosaic patterns drifting by on a descending escalator – all these instances have inspired Ryan to pause and capture their essence. Encoded within these seemingly mundane moments lie infinite worlds both above and below the recorded surfaces.

“Working in what feels like a collaboration with my computer, there is an intuitive give and take between my aesthetic sensibilities and the software’s editing tools. Together we are drawn towards abstraction, where the moving imagery is pulled further and further away from its original source material in order to reveal ground.” — Ryan Sarah Murphy

Artist Statement

My creative practice is intuitive and process-driven, generated by the found ephemera and momentary happenings of my daily experience. My work includes video, photography, sculptural reliefs, and mixed media works on paper. The process of collage lies at the foundation of everything I make. The emergent themes I tend to arrive at again and again are rooted in architecture, landscape and geometric abstraction. I am interested in the psychological underpinnings within spatial forms and the built environment, and how the configuration of architectural elements can be shaped to personify and/or reveal one’s inner experience. 

My process in making a video piece begins by capturing a fleeting moment in nature. These initial recordings act as foundational roadmaps to parts unknown. There are worlds contained within these banal moments, discoverable only through a symbiotic, digital collaboration with my computer. With a beginning emphasis on color and line alteration, I transform each recording using editing software in which the computer offers a seemingly infinite array of visual cues. I am in constant search of some sense of interior landscape or psychological grounding. I tend to edit and construct each piece within an architectural framework, allowing for the visual movement within each clip to convey an underlying felt-experience: restraint, controlled chaos, interconnection, or the longing for equilibrium and transcendence. In my practice, the in-process, exploratory editing of a piece is paramount to its final outcome. I move through the editing process intuitively, never quite knowing where the imagery will end up.

ARTIST OTHER WORKS