About the Exhibition
Cityview Gallery, Rochester Art Center: September 2025 - April 2026
Face in Clouds, invisible ink encompasses several recent bodies of work that proceed both literally and figuratively out of a reckoning with invisible illness. The first part of the title describes an emoji that Woodring sends loved ones as shorthand for flares; a simple data point for diagnostically-avoidant experience. Sending the emoji with the “invisible ink” effect shatters it into glimmering pixels, reconsolidating only upon touch. The works in this exhibition engage in similar cycles of rendering and refusal, bobbing at the surface of communicable experience in a post-AI landscape of hyper-classification. Stemming from ritualized visualization practices such as 3D-modeling the contours of illness while under its influence, to drawing all 99 of the “sick” and “tired” works on display at a museum, each work functions as a procedural export from a mediated exchange between an internal affliction and its speculative materialization.
About the artist:
Compelled by a bilateral relationship with invisibility wrought by an ongoing undiagnosed illness and a decade+ of visual effects experience making things disappear, Ryan Woodring (he/they) creates sustained agency for unpredictable and illegible modes of being via experimental, time-based practice. Woodring earned his MFA from Rutgers University and is currently Assistant Teaching Professor of Digital Media at Drew University, New Jersey. Pedagogy provides a guide for reciprocity and collaborative research within Woodring’s practice. In 2025, he founded the Soft Data/Base, an interactive archive compiling artist projects that generate soft data for ineffable experience, and developed a touring drawing workshop in conjunction with his recently published coloring book “Sick and Tired at the Met” (Irrelevant Press 2025). Woodring co-founded Prequel, a free low-residency program in Portland, Oregon that generated numerous enduring mentor-based relationships, and is a current member of Blockbusters Video Collective, New York. Woodring has exhibited and spoken internationally in various contexts such as The Museum of the Moving Image, Rochester Art Center, Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, The International Museum of Surgical Science, Portland Biennial, and elsewhere, receiving project support from the The Andy Warhol Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council of Oregon, Institute of Network Cultures, and others. His work has been included in publications such as Hyperallergic, Interview Magazine, and Redefine Magazine. In 2025, he delivered a talk at the Mayo Clinic titled Rendering Illness: Artistic Practice at the Boundaries of Diagnosis and recently published a peer-reviewed essay on navigating undiagnosed illness via artistic practice in the International Journal of Education in the Arts. Woodring lives and naps in Queens, NY. https://ryanwoodring.com/
Documentation by Ryan Woodring