Ryan Legassicke is a contemporary Canadian artist born in 1979.  His informal education began in Southern Ontario, continuing at the Sheridan Institute in Oakville, Ontairo (design dip. 2000,) and the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Alberta (BFA, 2002.)  Presently Ryan is an MFA candidate and Deans Fellow at the State University of New York at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York.

    Projects range from interdisciplinary installations to site specific sculptures and interventions, to furniture design.   He is interested in the intersection between conceptual art practices and utilitarian design in relation to the ways in which people live.  Ryan's work is a response to an age where experience through depictions seems to precede experience with the object / event depicted and one where our perceptual world is becoming more and more stimulated by simulation.  He is interested in the ways that found objects, sculpture, photography and drawing create, record, stop and erase time and how this affects how we both mentally and physically experience the present, past and future.  Focus is placed on the phenomenon of déjà vu – the sensation of having experienced an exact situation more than once, memory and the transition from experience to belief.  Through working with both objects and images and subsequently presented them in relation to the space they occupy, Ryan utilizes double views, mirror images, 1:1 reproduction, and positive and negative space as a means of exposing tensions and contradictions between the convergence of discovered and invented realities.  This sets up paradoxes and comparisons that create, record and occasionally blur moments in time while providing a way to experience ourselves becoming involved in those moments.  Ultimately he is interested in how imagery meets physicality and vice versa  through this mode of production and the process of experience and description. 

    Ryan has work in the permanent collection of the Thunder Bay Art Gallery in Thunder Bay, Ontario.  He has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council (2006,07) and in 2001 he won awards for Best of Show and Best Sculpture for an installation / performance at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition in Toronto, ON.  In 2003 Ryan worked as a teaching assistant for British Sculptor David Nash at North Lands Creative Glass in Lybster, Scotland.  In 2007 Ryan worked with David at his studio in Blaenau Ffestiniog, North Wales, and in Lewes, England.

    Exhibitions include Greg Forrest & Ryan Legassicke, curated by Gil McElroy at Station Gallery in Whitby, ON (2007);  Whisper and Clang, curated by Melanie Egan at the Harbourfront Center in Toronto, ON (2007);  Come Up to My Room, curated by Pamila Matharu & Christina Zeidler at the Gladstone Hotel, Toronto, ON (2005-06); and Looking Forward, curated by Paul Greenhaugh, destinations included the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, ON (2000-01).  Ryan has had images of his work published in Metropolis, New York City,  Azure, Toronto, and Toronto Life, Toronto, amongst others.  In 2004 Ryan self published a flip book for the project Still Life / Motion Life (2002-04.)  In Toronto his work that functions as furniture can be found at MADE and INabstracto.