“Between Ourselves, Our Screens, And The Sky”: The Photographic Work Of Ryan Molnar
- Name
- Ryan Molnar
- Words
- Steph Wade
The ouvre of San Francisco-based photographer and installation artist Ryan Molnar is rooted in exploring the ephemeral and curious relationships between imagination and reality. His ethereal visual language is the extension of how he sees the world: sometimes poetic, sometimes chaotic, but always questioning what it means to exist.
Molnar’s installations, which make up one half of his portfolio, are what he describes to IGNANT as disruptive investigations of two and three dimensional spaces. “They exist as a kind of dysmorphia between the digital and physical,” he says. “The image becomes a starting point for these physical works, which are prescribed new meanings through their altered, material form.” His body of work is comprised of another artistic medium, photography, which is Molnar’s preferred method to visually examine the ways in which technology mediates contemporary experience. “I’m drawn to emotional and psychological perspectives within image making,” he explains, “and what it means to exist within hyper-connection, overstimulation, climate change, and global socio-economic and political unrest.”
Featured below, his largely documentary-style photography has a mysterious element to it—his striking and sometimes unusual image compositions instill intrigue in the viewer. The space between all things, seen and unseen, is what Molnar finds compelling. While photography is no longer separate from our daily lives, for Molnar, it is a tool to facilitate meaning; to understand that our existence lies “somewhere between ourselves, our screens, and the sky.”
All images © Ryan Molnar