LEAH RYU: ARTIST STATEMENT

I constantly seek material evidence for my own existence because I have always felt contextless and hollow, though, like everyone else, I come from a time and place with its own stories. Like a hologram or another heretofore unnamed trick of the light, I do not understand how others react to me, or if perhaps I am as inert as the dust from which I was never made. So I create new mythologies, mingling crafted objects with found objects and abdicating all responsibility for the provenance of the artifacts I fabricate; this hunt for origin is an exercise I leave for the careful future reader. I leave traces of tenderness like footprints in the data of the stories I tell, an aberrant dent or smell in the endless nonspecific visual pattern, and then I become that careful reader. I call this the archeology of the self– a creative process that also destroys (that tightly packed dirt of time’s graveyard), which requires me to pillage my own past and rebury it, inevitably altered if only by the

I constantly seek material evidence for my own existence because I have always felt contextless and hollow, though, like everyone else, I come from a time and place with its own stories. Like a hologram or another heretofore unnamed trick of the light, I do not understand how others react to me, or if perhaps I am as inert as the dust from which I was never made. So I create new mythologies, mingling crafted objects with found objects and abdicating all responsibility for the provenance of the artifacts I fabricate; this hunt for origin is an exercise I leave for the careful future reader. I l