Exhibitions and Events
Maker’s Mart: Harold Washington Library
July 11, 202 | 11am - 3pm
Harold Washington Library, 9th floor Winter Garden
Curated by Design Museum of Chicago
Art of Being: Quantum Entanglement
Relating movement to mark - making to cyanotype.
How do we access deep, embodied knowledge of the “self?” For the past month, I’ve been in workshop with other artists exploring “quantum entanglement” through movement.
I’ve then taken my learnings back to the studio, applying a more intentioned and aware flow of movement in my mark making and cyanotype printing.
The public was invited to join as “conscious observers,” on Saturday, February 14, at 2pm for a viewing, brief reflection, and reception.
Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble: 1650 W Foster Ave, 2nd floor. (In the church)
Art of Being workshops are conceptualized and facilitated by Ayako Kato.
Staple and Stitch Publisher’s Fair
November 14 - 16, 2025 | Hotel 55, Chicago, IL
Staple and Stitch print and publishers fair offered a vast array of view points on print. Ryn was thrilled to be a part of the conversation, tabling withCampfire Printing Press.
Staple and Stitch saw the first public release of Ryn’s relief work, “Hesitations” and “Will you take what is not yet formed, will you hold this need with me?”Gamblin oil based woodblock prints on Yasutomo Washi Hosho paper.
Fellow Campfire artist Deirdre Colgan Jones
Independent residency at Eagle Lake
June 2025 | Ohio
Ryn completed a cyanotype collection spanning 2021 - 2025, Tension in Ease, outdoors before the back drop of Eagle Lake.
This self initiated experience urged Ryn to expand and fill space, react intuitively, and work frolicsomely, mark making as her cyanotypes were already beginning to expose beneath the sun and blow in the wind.
You can see the complete Tension in Ease collection here.
Confluence
January - March 2022
Heaven Gallery, Chicago, IL
In Confluence, the artists seek transformation through their work, engaging with water as a space of intimacy and transcendence. Through labor- intensive, meditative processes, including dyeing, staining, stitching, rinsing, and weaving, the artists bring their metaphysical explorations into reality for the viewer to experience, creating space for new understandings to emerge and finding wholeness from many parts. Many of these processes involve water as a means to transform or create the object.
Confluence is grounded in the artists’ exploration of their vulnerabilities and offers a contribution to the conversation on process and materiality.
Work by Abena Motaboli, Lucia Calderon, Olive Stefanski, and Ryn Osbourne
Dark Matter
2016 | Port Gallery | New Orleans, LA
Artists gathered at Port Gallery and Antenna New Orleans for movement exercises and discussion centering the theme, dark matter.
Pictured are intuitive drawing exercises led by artist Heather Hanson. Prompts included (paraphrased from Ryn’s memory) “draw the space you are in,” and “act out a scene from your life.” With a new sense of artistic freedom, Ryn moved through scenes from birth to death, reaching a sense of contentment with “the self, alone.”
This work marked a significant shift and continuation in Ryn’s practice away from place and object - based, research work and towards movement - based, intuitive making.
Meat Sink II, MINT member exhibition
2016 | MINT | Columbus, OH
The second iteration of the annual MINT Collective member exhibition.
This exhibition features Fluid, the first cyanotypes Ryn created from hand - drawn transparencies, marking the beginning of a significant shit in her practice towards process - based, intuitive making.
Ryn was a member of MINT Collective from 2015 to 2017, making and exhibiting out of a former meat packing warehouse in Columbus, OH. With a mission to challenge “traditional” ways of institutional thinking in the arts, this early career experience significantly influenced Ryn to experiment and play with process.
Statement:
Migration, or movement, suggests that as an object or a body moves from one place to another, it becomes redefined or repurposed according to its new location. By taking found discarded objects and reprinting them as cyanotypes I am adding a new meaning to the object by allowing it to be viewed outside its conventional space.
Objects are symbolic of ownership, movement, activity and place. Objects are the material representations of the body’s needs and actions and are the results of a body’s ability to make, obtain, consume and discard. As objects move through this fluid process, their meanings change, and discarded objects are often seen as purposeless.
In printing cyanotypes from discarded objects and displaying the prints and the objects side by side in a gallery space, I am changing the meaning of an object, from nothingness to purposefulness, from discarded to useful, from ugly to beautiful. Additionally, the bright blues and whimsical qualities of the cyanotype suggest a mysterious quality, parallel to that of a found object and the mystery as to how it came to be.
My work comments on how quick we are to place a defined meaning on something, not allowing our definitions any flexibility or openness. By employing reaction, representation and symbolism, my work suggest that actively taking note and questioning the meaning of the objects that surround us opens up a discussion of critical inquiry into the social, spatial and political narratives which inform our everyday lives and actions, as represented by the objects we experience.
Objects, once removed
2016 | Satellite Contemporary | Las Vegas, NV
Objects, once removed is a collection of found object cyanotypes exhibited as part of DeMaster, an exhibition of MINT collective artists, none of whom received training at the Master’s level.
Objects were installed alongside their prints.
Curated by Marisa Espe.
From Trash to Treasure: Junk Dada Super Sunday
The Wexner Center for the Arts
Spring 2016
Based on the work of Noah Purifoy,
Junk Dada Super Sunday is a an installation project by MINT Collective, inviting members of the public to transorm the Mershon Lobby of the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH, by creating sculptural “junk” installations.
By using literal junk in the creation of art, these installations communicate ideas reflected in Purifoy's work. The installation and the act of making challenged participants to rethink their relationship to objects or "junk" in order to use "junk" to make art. Repurposing objects invites the public to consider the multiple meanings objects have in relation to themselves and to their environment.
Despite the fact that some objects were curbside finds or removed from a warehouse/old meat processing plant, the public engaged with the objects creating a collaborative installation.
Images courtesy of Clara Hirsch