Ryan Josey

Ryan Josey is a Nova Scotian visual artist from Dartmouth and Kwimue’katik. Since graduating NSCAD University in 2015, his multi-disciplinary work has featured in exhibitions across Canada, Turkey, New York and Finland.

Josey’s philosophically inflected pieces stem from ongoing explorations in observational drawing and writing. Their drawings, as well as their large-scale installations, circulate belonging and queer the tools, systems and languages that encode identity into place. Often, Josey’s works show an interplay between digital and analog ways of seeing. Often, they foreground the act of their making as part of their meaning. Most recently, this manifested in Josey’s 5 year long, durational painting series, The Red Hands of The Sky. In which the act of painting becomes a witnessed meditation on grief and renewal.

Josey has been awarded multiple grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and Arts Nova Scotia. He has participated in residencies internationally, including the New York Arts Practicum (New York); the Centre for Art Tapes (Halifax); the Arteles Centre (Finland); Plug In ICA partnered with DIS.art (Winnipeg); Eastern Edge (St. John’s); and Taidetila Muijala (Finland).

Josey’s long-running practice of experimental writing and self-imaging is hosted @ryryjo on Instagram. An archive of anarchist thought, embedded in a techno-capitalist platform, the project highlights the incompressibility of life into digital forms. Josey lives and works in Halifax.