Ryan Van Der Hout (b. 1987, Canada) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, public art, and sculpture. They activate material processes to navigate states of being, such as grief, undoing, and queer becoming. Central to Van Der Hout's practice is the innovative use of photographic imagery as a foundational element in creating three-dimensional objects and installations, consistently using the photographic image as a scaffold to create objects that utilize the image as pure material.
Van Der Hout’s work has been widely featured in publications including Time Out NY, NBC News, The Huffington Post, Vogue Italia, Fortune Magazine, Larry’s List, CBC, PhotoEd Magazine and Reader’s Digest. He has exhibited across Canada, The United Kingdom, and New York, most notably in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Collectors Series, as part of a Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival primary exhibitions, and in The Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward festival. They have created public art for Washington Square. Park, NYC Parks, the City of Toronto, Toronto Archives, The TTC, Nuit Blanche and Pemberton Developments. Van Der Hout was awarded the Emerging Artist Award by the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council. Van Der Hout has spoken at Columbia, TMU, The New School and OCAD. They have a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Metropolitan University and an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons at The New School.
