Kat Ryals (b. 1988 in Jonesboro, AR) is a Brooklyn-based artist, curator, and photographer. Ryals received a BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA & Adv. Certificate in Museum Education from Brooklyn College. She has shown her work nationally, including in a solo booth at SPRING/BREAK Art Show in 2020 and 2022, a collaborative two person show at Elijah Wheat Showroom in 2023, a two person show at Ortega Y Gasset Projects in 2022, and in recent group exhibitions with ChaShaMa, Ortega Y Gasset Projects, and The Wassaic Project. Ryals has also completed several artist residencies, including the Wassaic Project (2017, 2019, 2022), ChaNorth (2019), the Peter Bullough Foundation (2021), and a Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center (2018). Ryals will also be an Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan in 2024. She is also the Co-founder of the online arts platform, PARADICE PALASE, based out of Brooklyn and was recently the Curator of Art for famed nightlife and culture venues House of X at PUBLIC and House of Yes.

Ryals' practice is often influenced by her upbringing in Arkansas and the Acadiana region of Louisiana, where her days were spent rummaging through thrift and junk stores, daydreaming in ornate Catholic churches, and roaming unspoiled forests and swamps.

Artist Statement
Ryals’ artist practice examines the internalized power objects and design hold over us, and how mythmaking, ornamentation, and special effects can serve as tools for manipulation. Utilizing the dichotomies of natural/artificial, trash/treasure, sacred/profane, and luxury/kitsch within her work, she emulates material culture artifacts to investigate how value is manufactured. By creating mixed media sculptures, lens-based work, wearable art, and site-specific or immersive installations, she seeks to understand how the cultural currencies of authenticity, taste, and illusion are used to generate an economy of perceived value and hierarchy within our world.

Her recent work has been specifically concerned with the relationship between waste and desire. Employing speculative fiction to create specimens and artifacts, she turns our attention to the unbridled mass production and consumption that has led to a culture of casual anthropogenic waste accumulation.