Ryan Legassicke is a contemporary Canadian artist born in 1979.  His current work examines contemporary urban spaces 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.  "If our built environment, the stuff that we surround ourselves with, is a refection of our vales as a culture, can we conclude that this same environment, created both individually and as a society, influences the way we experience and feel about the world?  And furthermore, with the rise of globalization, does this happen on a larger scale? Do the ways that other cultures choose to live, or are forced to live reflect and influence us?"

   Earlier work dealt more specifically with examining utilitarian materials such as wood and glass in relation to their means of production and our interaction with the resulting objects.  While this emphasis on material is still present, the recent work focuses equally on the physical, social, public, and private spaces that these objects occupy.  The work is a way to understand and test these boundaries.  It sets up paradoxes and comparisons that describe moments in time while providing a way to experience ourselves becoming involved in those moments.  Ryan's work examines our relationship to urban spaces where histories are removed, intolerance is enforced, and people attempt to live in a paradoxical space that refuses unity, stability, wholeness and identity.  

    Recently he presented the project  Separation Wall Global Park (a proposal) at TEDx Bermuda and at Homework: Infrastructures and Collaboration in Social Practice conference presented by Broken City Lab at the Art Gallery of Windsor. Recent projects include an outdoor site specific painting on mesh entitled States of Security / Security States at Eastern State Penitentiary Historical Site in Philadelphia, USA, which opened May 2012.

    Ryan currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.