Ryder Richards The Idyll

Ryder Richards’ installation, The Idyll, is a hybrid between a pulpit and science fiction control station: a modernist temple to information complete with security cameras, recessed lighting, digital projections, and panels of quasi-unintelligible text and formulas. Upon entering the exhibition the participant can be documented, image projected, and stripped of identity markers conforming to a Universalist ideal: a dissipation of “self” into simplified aesthetic phenomena. Reacting to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the detached image of cinema living a more rich, traveled, and complex life than the actor, Ryder hopes to thwart this aggrandizement of “self-image” in a more Eastern sensibility: dissolution of self to merge with the whole, a sacrifice of identity for commonality.