Ryan Legassicke is a contemporary Canadian artist born in 1979.  Projects range from interdisciplinary installations to site specific sculptures and interventions, to furniture design.  Ryan is interested in the overlap between practical and aesthetic function, perception and physical presence.  His current work examines contemporary urban cities and makes connections between our shared aesthetic experience and the idea that we are becoming progressively more disconnected from ourselves, each other, and the places that we inhabit.  Earlier work examined utilitarian materials such as wood and glass in relation to their means of production and our interaction with the resulting objects.  Ryan's practice can be seen as part public performance, part document and part artwork.  He is interested in the inter-relationships between physical, social, public, and private spaces.  The work is a way to test these boundaries and investigates how our experience of these spaces supports and contradicts the idea that our lives are becoming ever more controlled, over-planned, and predetermined.

    Ryan's informal education began in Southern Ontario, continuing at the Sheridan Institute in Oakville, Ontario, and the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Alberta.  Recently Ryan was a Deans Fellow at the State  University of New York at Buffalo and graduated with an MFA in Studio Practice from the department of Visual Studies.  He has work in the permanent collection of the Thunder Bay Art Gallery in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.  In 2001 he won awards for Best of Show and Best Sculpture for an installation / performance at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition in Toronto.  Images of Ryan's work have appeared in various publications including Metropolis, New York City, and in the exhibition catalogue for Looking Forward, curated by Paul Greenhaugh.  Ryan has taught sculpture classes at both the State University of New York at Buffalo and at the Sheridan Institute in Oakville, ON.  He has served as a teaching assistant for British Sculptor David Nash at North Lands Creative Glass in Lybster, Scotland, and later worked with David for a summer at his studio in Blaenau Ffestiniog, North Wales, and in Lewes, England.  Recently he assisted a summer camp in New Hampshire with the fabrication of a floating sculpture, and worked with artist Zaq Landsburg creating a site based sculpture in the Utah desert.  Ryan currently lives and work in Toronto, and has upcoming projects scheduled in Berlin / Leipzig and Detrot / Windsor.  In Toronto his work that functions as furniture can be found at MADE and INabstracto.