“I want to make a rainbow out of trash,” says Ryan Evans, an artist based in the suburbs of South Jersey who is creating just that. Except this isn’t the work of a collage artist literally taking trash and refashioning it across a canvas like a school project, but a collage-style illustrator who takes the excess of consumerism and meme imagery to create dense, multi-coloured portraits of our visual culture.
Living somewhere between sincerity and satire, Ryan uses coloured pencils and acrylic paint to honour “the kind of things meant to be used once and forgotten”, sometimes working directly on McDonald’s receipts or parking tickets. His imagery is a splatter of mundane and even nonsensical images that find a new meaning when crammed together – pink assault rifles, military styled LaBuBu’s, a keyboard’s escape button, Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho – Ryan simply connects the cerebral pathways that link images in our minds.
Whether it’s piggy banks on cardboard, renders of ritalin bottles on data sheets or the Internet Explorer logo drawn over a weeping Statue of Liberty, it’s clear to see Ryan’s sense of humour elevates his daily doomscroll into something vibrant, unlocking passages through a heightened digital world into real emotion. “I ask myself what I want to see. Is it some type of visual joke I want to make or a piece of nostalgia I’d like to parody?”
As well as that, part of the charm of Ryan’s work and his eye for composition no doubt comes from his inspiration from media that inspires awe like The Matrix, Nicolas Cage films and even Death Stranding 2, an eccentric video game that some say is much more like a playable movie. Ryan channels the brain-melting absurdity of Peter Saul with the simplicity of a fast food restaurant. Garish but loveable.
“I’m drawn to the parts of life that feel both ridiculous and terrifying – the things we scroll past but can’t stop thinking about later,” says Ryan, citing algorithmic abysses, existential dread and consumerism as nightmarish inspirations. “You know, the good stuff,” quips Ryan. Trying to make sense of the modern and loud world, this work is how Ryan moves through the noise.